The Winter of Our Discontent

Chapter eleven

New Baytown is a lovely place. Its harbor, once a great one, is sheltered from the northeast screamers by an offshore island. The village is strewn about a complex of inland waters fed by the tides, which at ebb and flow drive wild races through narrow channels from the harbor and the sea. It is not a crowded or an urban town. Except for the great houses of the long-gone whalers, the dwellings are small and neat, distributed among fine old trees, oaks of several kinds, maples and elms, hickory and some cypresses, but except for the old planted elms on the original streets, the native timber is largely oak. Once the virgin oaks were so many and so large that several shipyards drew planks and knees, keels and keelsons, from nearby.

Communities, like people, have periods of health and times of sickness—even youth and age, hope and despondency. There was a time when a few towns like New Baytown furnished the whale oil that lighted the Western World. Student lamps of Oxford and Cambridge drew fuel from this American outpost. And then petroleum, rock oil, gushed out in Pennsylvania and cheap kerosene, called coal oil, took the place of whale oil and retired most of the sea hunters. Sickness or despair fell on New Baytown—perhaps an attitude from which it did not recover. Other towns not too far away grew and prospered on other products and energies, but New Baytown, whose whole living force had been in square-rigged ships and whales, sank into torpor. The snake of population crawling out from New York passed New Baytown by, leaving it to its memories. And, as usually happens, New Baytown people persuaded themselves that they liked it that way. They were spared the noise and litter of summer people, the garish glow of neon signs, the spending of tourist money and tourist razzle-dazzle. Only a few new houses were built around the fine inland waters. But the snake of population continued to writhe out and everyone knew that sooner or later it would engulf the village of New Baytown. The local people longed for that and hated the idea of it at the same time. The neighboring towns were rich, spilled over with loot from tourists, puffed with spoils, gleamed with the great houses of the new rich. Old Baytown spawned art and ceramics and pansies, and the damn broadfooted brood of Lesbos wove handmade fabrics and small domestic intrigues. New Baytown talked of the old days and of flounder and when the weakfish would start running.

In the reedy edges of the inner waters, the mallards nested and brought out their young flotillas, muskrats dug communities and swam lithely in the early morning. The ospreys hung, aimed, and plummeted on fish, and sea gulls carried clams and scallops high in the air and dropped them to break them open for eating. Some otters still clove the water like secret furry whispers; rabbits poached in the gardens and gray squirrels moved like little waves in the streets of the village. Cock pheasants flapped and coughed their crowing. Blue herons poised in the shallow water like leggy rapiers and at night the bitterns cried out like lonesome ghosts.

Spring is late and summer late at New Baytown, but when it comes it has a soft, wild, and special sound and smell and feeling. In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different. Then in the evening the bobwhites state their crisp names and after dark there is a wall of sound of whippoorwill. The oaks grow fat with leaf and fling their long-tasseled blossoms in the grass. Then dogs from various houses meet and go on picnics, wandering bemused and happy in the woods, and sometimes they do not come home for days.

In June man, hustled by instinct, mows grass, riffles the earth with seeds, and locks in combat with mole and rabbit, ant, beetle, bird, and all others who gather to take his garden from him. Woman looks at the curling-edge petals of a rose and melts a little and sighs, and her skin becomes a petal and her eyes are stamens.

June is gay—cool and warm, wet and shouting with growth and reproduction of the sweet and the noxious, the builder and the spoiler. The girls in body-form slacks wander the High Street with locked hands while small transistor radios sit on their shoulders and whine love songs in their ears. The young boys, bleeding with sap, sit on the stools of Tanger’s Drugstore ingesting future pimples through straws. They watch the girls with level goat-eyes and make disparaging remarks to one another while their insides whimper with longing.

In June businessmen drop by Al ’n’ Sue’s or the Foremaster for a beer and stay for whisky and get sweatily drunk in the afternoon. Even in the afternoon the dusty cars creep to the desolate dooryard of the remote and paintless house with every blind drawn, at the end of Mill Street, where Alice, the village whore, receives the afternoon problems of June-bitten men. And all day long the rowboats anchor off the breakwater and happy men and women coax up their dinners from the sea.

June is painting and clipping, plans and projects. It’s a rare man who doesn’t bring home cement blocks and two-by-fours and on the backs of envelopes rough out drawings of Taj Mahals. A hundred little boats lie belly down and keel up on the shore, their bottoms gleaming with copper paint, and their owners straighten up and smile at the slow, unmoving windrows. Still school grips the intransigent children until near to the end of the month and, when examination time comes, rebellion foams up and the common cold becomes epidemic, a plague which disappears on closing day.

In June the happy seed of summer germinates. “Where shall we go over the glorious Fourth of July?… It’s getting on time we should be planning our vacation.” June is the mother of potentials, ducklings swim bravely perhaps to the submarine jaws of snapping turtles, lettuces lunge toward drought, tomatoes rear defiant stems toward cutworms, and families match the merits of sand and sunburn over fretful mountain nights loud with mosquito symphonies. “This year I’m going to rest. I won’t get so tired. This year I won’t allow the kids to make my free two weeks a hell on wheels. I work all year. This is my time. I work all year.” Vacation planning triumphs over memory and all’s right with the world.[48]

New Baytown had slept for a long time. The men who governed it, politically, morally, economically, had so long continued that their ways were set. The Town Manager, the council, the judges, the police were eternal. The Town Manager sold equipment to the township, and the judges fixed traffic tickets as they had for so long that they did not remember it as illegal practice—at least the books said it was. Being normal men, they surely did not consider it immoral. All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.

The yellow afternoon had the warm breath of summer. A few early season people, those without children to hold them glued until school was out, were moving in the streets, strangers. Some cars came through, towing small boats and big outboard motors on trailers. Ethan would have known with his eyes closed that they were summer people by what they bought—cold cuts and process cheese, crackers and tinned sardines.

Joey Morphy came in for his afternoon refreshment as he did every day now that the weather was warming. He waved the bottle toward the cold counter. “You should put in a soda fountain,” he said.

“And grow four new arms, or split into two clerks like a pseudopod? You forget, neighbor Joey, I don’t own the store.”

“You should.”

“Must I tell you my sad story of the death of kings?”[49]

“I know your story. You didn’t know your asparagus from a hole in the double-entry bookkeeping. You had to learn the hard way. Now wait—but you learned.”

“Small good it does me.”

“If it was your store now, you’d make money.”

“But it isn’t.”

“If you opened up next door, you’d take all the customers with you.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because people buy from people they know. It’s called good will and it works.”

“Didn’t work before. Everybody in town knew me. I went broke.”

“That was technical. You didn’t know how to buy.”

“Maybe I still don’t.”

“You do. You don’t even know you’ve learned. But you’ve still got a broke state of mind. Junk it, Mr. Hawley. Junk it, Ethan.”

“Thanks.”

“I like you. When is Marullo going to Italy?”

“He hasn’t said. Tell me, Joey—how rich is he? No, don’t. I know you’re not supposed to talk about clients.”

“I can rupture a rule for a friend, Ethan. I don’t know all his affairs, but if our account means anything, I’d say he is. He’s got his fingers in all kinds of things—piece of property here, vacant lot there, some beach-front houses, and a bundle of first mortgages big around as your waist.”

“How do you know?”

“Safe-deposit box. He rents one of our big ones. When he opens it, he has one key and I have the other. I’ll admit I’ve peeked. Guess I’m a peeping Tom at heart.”

“But it’s all on the level, isn’t it? I mean—well you read all the time about—well, drugs and rackets and things like that.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. He don’t tell his business around. Draws some out, puts some back. And I don’t know where else he banks. You notice I don’t tell his balance.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Could you let me have a beer?”

“Only to take out. I can put it in a paper cup.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to break the law.”

“Nuts!” Ethan punched holes in a can. “Just hold it down beside you if anybody comes in.”

“Thanks. I’ve put a lot of thought on you, Ethan.”

“Why?”

“Maybe because I’m a Nosy Parker.[50] Failure is a state of mind. It’s like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it. You’ve got to make that jump, Eth. Once you get out, you’ll find success is a state of mind too.”

“Is it a trap too?”

“If it is—it’s a better kind.”

“Suppose a man makes the jump, and someone else gets tromped.”

“Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn’t do anything about it.”

“I wish I knew what you’re trying to tell me to do.”

“I wish I did too. If I did, I might do it myself. Bank tellers don’t get to be president. A man with a fistful of stock does. I guess I’m trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.”

“You’re a philosopher, Joey, a financial philosopher.”

“Don’t rub it in. If you don’t have it, you think about it. Man being alone thinks about things. You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future. Old Satchel Paige[51] said the wisest thing about that I ever heard. He said, ‘Don’t look behind. Something may be gaining on you.’ I got to get back. Mr. Baker’s going to New York tomorrow for a few days. He’s busy as a bug.”

“What about?”

“How do I know? But I separate the mail. He’s been getting a lot from Albany.”

“Politics?”

“I only separate it. I don’t read it. Is business always this slow?”

“Around four o’clock, yes. It’ll pick up in ten minutes or so.”

“You see? You’ve learned. I bet you didn’t know that before you went broke. Be seeing you. Grab the gold ring for a free ride.”

The little buying spurt between five and six came on schedule. The sun, held back by daylight-saving, was still high and the streets light as midafternoon when he brought in the fruit bins and closed the front doors and drew the green shades. Then, reading from a list, he gathered the supplies to carry home and put them all in one big bag. With his apron off and his coat and hat on, he boosted up and sat on the counter and stared at the shelves of the congregation. “No message!” he said. “Only remember the words of Satchel Paige. I guess I have to learn about not looking back.”

He took the folded lined pages from his wallet, made a little envelope for them of waxed paper. Then, opening the enamel door to the works of the cold counter, he slipped the waxy envelope in a corner behind the compressor and closed the metal door on it.

Under the cash register on a shelf he found the dusty and dogeared Manhattan telephone book, kept there for emergency orders to the supply house. Under U, under United States, under Justice, Dept of… His finger moved down the column past “Antitrust Div US Court House, Customs Div, Detention Hdqtrs, Fed Bur of Investgatn,” and under it, “Immigration & Naturalization Svce, 20 W Bway, BA 7-0300, Nights Sat Sun & Holidays OL 6-5888.”

He said aloud, “OL 6-5888—OL 6-5888 because it’s late.” And then he spoke to his canned goods without looking at them. “If everything’s proper and aboveboard, nobody gets hurt.”

Ethan went out the alley door and locked it. He carried his bag of groceries across the street to the Foremaster Hotel and Grill. The grill was noisy with cocktailers but the tiny lobby where the public phone booth stood was deserted even by the room clerk. He closed the glass door, put his groceries on the floor, spread his change on the shelf, inserted a dime, and dialed 0.

“Operator.”

“Oh! Operator—I want to call New York.”

“Will you dial the number, please?”

And he did.

Ethan came from work, carrying his bag of groceries. How good the long afternoons are! The lawn was so tall and lush that it took his footprints. He kissed Mary damply.

“Pollywog,” he said, “the lawn is running wild. Do you think I could get Allen to cut it?”

“Well, it’s examination time. You know how that is, and school closing and all.”

“What’s that unearthly squalling sound in the other room?”

“He’s practicing with his voice-throwing gadget. He’s going to perform at the school closing show.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to cut the lawn myself.”

“I’m sorry, dear. But you know how they are.”

“Yes, I’m beginning to learn how they are.”

“Are you in a bad temper? Did you have a hard day?”

“Let’s see. No, I guess not. I’ve been on my feet all day. The thought of pushing the lawnmower doesn’t make me jump with joy.”

“We should have a power mower. The Johnsons have one you can ride on.”

“We should have a gardener and a gardener’s boy. My grandfather did. Ride on? Allen might cut the lawn if he could ride.”

“Don’t be mean to him. He’s only fourteen. They’re all like that.”

“Who do you suppose established the fallacy that children are cute?”

“You are in a bad temper.”

“Let’s see. Yes, I guess I am. And that squalling is driving me crazy.”

“He’s practicing.”

“So you said.”

“Now don’t take your bad temper out on him.”

“All right, but it would help if I could.” Ethan pushed through the living room, where Allen was squawking vaguely recognizable words from a vibrating reed held on his tongue. “What in the world is that?”

Allen spat it into his palm. “From that box of Peeks. It’s ventriloquism.”

“Did you eat the Peeks?”

“No. I don’t like it. I’ve got to practice, Dad.”

“Hold up a moment.” Ethan sat down. “What do you plan to do with your life?”

“Huh?”

“The future. Haven’t they told you in school? The future is in your hands.”

Ellen slithered into the room and draped herself on the couch like a knob-kneed cat. She rippled out a steel-cutting giggle.

“He wants to go on television,” she said.

“There was a kid only thirteen won a hundred and thirty thousand dollars on a quiz program.”

“Turned out it was rigged,” said Ellen.

“Well, he still had a hundred and thirty grand.”

Ethan said softly, “The moral aspects don’t bother you?”

“Well, it’s still a lot of dough.”

“You don’t find it dishonest?”

“Shucks, everybody does it.”

“How about the ones who offer themselves on a silver platter and there are no takers? They have neither honesty nor money.”

“That’s the chance you take—the way the cooky crumbles.”

“Yes, it’s crumbling, isn’t it?” Ethan said. “And so are your manners. Sit up! Have you dropped the word ‘sir’ from the language?”

The boy looked startled, checked to see if it was meant, then lounged upright, full of resentment. “No, sir,” he said.

“How are you doing in school?”

“All right, I guess.”

“You were writing an essay about how you love America. Has your determination to destroy her stopped that project?”

“How do you mean, destroy—sir?”

“Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?”

“Heck, Dad, everybody does it.”

“Does that make it good?”

“Well, nobody’s knocking it except a few eggheads. I finished the essay.”

“Good, I’d like to see it.”

“I sent it off.”

“You must have a copy.”

“No, sir.”

“Suppose it gets lost?”

“I didn’t think of that. Dad, I wish I could go to camp the way all the other kids do.”

“We can’t afford it. Not all the other kids go—only a few of them.”

“I wish we had some money.” He stared down at his hands and licked his lips.

Ellen’s eyes were narrowed and concentrated.

Ethan studied his son. “I’m going to make that possible,” he said.

“Sir?”

“I can get you a job to work in the store this summer.”

“How do you mean, work?”

“Isn’t your question, ‘What do you mean, work?’ You will carry and trim shelves and sweep and perhaps, if you do well, you can wait on customers.”

“I want to go to camp.”

“You also want to win a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Maybe I’ll win the essay contest. At least that’s a trip to Washington anyway. Some kind of vacation after all year in school.”

“Allen! There are unchanging rules of conduct, of courtesy, of honesty, yes, even of energy. It’s time I taught you to give them lip service at least. You’re going to work.”

The boy looked up. “You can’t.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Child labor laws. I can’t even get a work permit before I’m sixteen. You want me to break the law?”

“Do you think all the boys and girls who help their parents are half slave and half criminal?” Ethan’s anger was as naked and ruthless as love. Allen looked away.

“I didn’t mean that, sir.”

“I’m sure you didn’t. And you won’t again. You stubbed your nose on twenty generations of Hawleys and Allens. They were honorable men. You may be worthy to be one someday.”

“Yes, sir. May I go to my room, sir?”

“You may.”

Allen walked up the stairs slowly.

When he had disappeared, Ellen whirled her legs like propellers. She sat up and pulled down her skirt like a young lady.

“I’ve been reading the speeches of Henry Clay.[52] He sure was good.”

“Yes, he was.”

“Do you remember them?”

“Not really, I guess. It’s been a long time since I read them.”

“He’s great.”

“Somehow it doesn’t seem schoolgirl reading.”

“He’s just great.”

Ethan got up from his chair with a whole long and weary day pushing him back.

In the kitchen he found Mary red-eyed and angry.

“I heard you,” she said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing. He’s just a little boy.”

“That’s the time to start, my darling.”

“Don’t darling me. I won’t stand a tyrant.”

“Tyrant? Oh, Lord!”

“He’s just a little boy. You went for him.”

“I think he feels better now.”

“I don’t know what you mean. You crushed him like an insect.”

“No, darling. I gave him a quick glimpse of the world. He was building a false one.”

“Who are you to know what the world is?”

Ethan walked past her and out the back door.

“Where are you going?”

“To cut the lawn.”

“I thought you were tired.”

“I am—I was.” He looked over his shoulder and up at her standing inside the screened door. “A man is a lonely thing,” he said, and he smiled at her a moment before he got out the lawnmower.

Mary heard the whirring blades tearing through the soft and supple grass.

The sound stopped by the doorstep. Ethan called, “Mary, Mary, my darling. I love you.” And the whirling blades raged on through the overgrown grass.

Chapter twelve

Margie Young-Hunt was an attractive woman, informed, clever; so clever that she knew when and how to mask her cleverness. Her marriages had failed, the men had failed; one by being weak, and the second weaker—he died. Dates did not come to her. She created them, mended her fences by frequent telephone calls, by letters, get-well cards, and arranged accidental meetings. She carried homemade soup to the sick and remembered birthdays. By these means she kept people aware of her existence.

More than any woman in town she kept her stomach flat, her skin clean and glowing, her teeth bright, and her chinline taut. A goodly part of her income went to hair, nails, massage, creams, and unguents. Other women said, “She must be older than she looks.”

When supporting muscles of her breasts no longer responded to creams, massage, and exercise, she placed them in shapely forms that rode high and jauntily. Her make-up took increasing time. Her hair had all the sheen, luster, wave the television products promise. On a date, dining, dancing, laughing, amusing, drawing her escort with a net of small magnets, who could know her cold sense of repetition? After a decent interval and an outlay of money, she usually went to bed with him if she discreetly could. Then back to her fence-mending. Sooner or later the shared bed must be the trap to catch her future security and ease. But the prospective game leaped clear of the quilted jaws. More and more of her dates were the married, the infirm, or the cautious. And Margie knew better than anyone that her time was running out. The tarot cards did not respond when she sought help for herself.

Margie had known many men, most of them guilty, wounded in their vanity, or despairing, so that she had developed a contempt for her quarry as a professional hunter of vermin does. It was easy to move such men through their fears and their vanities. They ached so to be fooled that she no longer felt triumph—only a kind of disgusted pity. These were her friends and associates. She protected them even from the discovery that they were her friends. She gave them the best of herself because they demanded nothing of her. She kept them secret because at the bottom she did not admire herself. Danny Taylor was one of these, and Alfio Marullo another, and Chief Stonewall Jackson Smith a third, and there were others. They trusted her and she them, and their secret existence was the one warm honesty to which she could retire to restore herself. These friends talked freely and without fear to her, for to them she was a kind of Andersen’s Well—receptive, unjudging, and silent. As most people have secret vices, Margie Young-Hunt concealed a secret virtue. And because of this quiet thing it is probable that she knew more about New Baytown, and even Wessex County, than anyone, and her knowledge was un-warped because she would not—could not—use it for her own profit. But in other fields, everything that came to her hand was usable.

Her project Ethan Allen Hawley began casually and out of idleness. In a way he was correct in thinking it was mischievous, a testing of her power. Many of the sad men who came to her for comfort and reassurance were hogtied with impotence, bound and helpless in sexual traumas that infected all other areas of their lives. And she found it easy by small flatteries and reassurances to set them free to fight again against their whip-armed wives. She was genuinely fond of Mary Hawley, and through her she gradually became aware of Ethan, bound in another kind of trauma, a social-economic bind that had robbed him of strength and certainty. Having no work, no love, no children, she wondered whether she could release and direct this crippled man toward some new end. It was a game, a kind of puzzle, a test, a product not of kindness but simply of curiosity and idleness. This was a superior man. To direct him would prove her superiority, and this she needed increasingly.

Probably she was the only one who knew the depth of the change in Ethan and it frightened her because she thought it was her doing. The mouse was growing a lion’s mane. She saw the muscles under his clothes, felt ruthlessness growing behind his eyes. So must the gentle Einstein have felt when his dreamed concept of the nature of matter flashed over Hiroshima.

Margie liked Mary Hawley very much and she had little sympathy and no pity for her. Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.

In her tiny immaculate house set in a large, overgrown garden very near to Old Harbor, she leaned toward the make-up mirror to inspect her tools, and her eyes saw through cream, powder, eye-shadowing, and lashes sheathed in black, saw the hidden wrinkles, the inelasticity of skin. She felt the years creep up like the rising tide about a rock in a calm sea. There is an arsenal of maturity, of middle age, but these require training and technique she did not yet have. She must learn them before her structure of youth and excitement crumbled and left her naked, rotten, ridiculous. Her success had been that she never let down, even alone. Now, as an experiment, she allowed her mouth to droop as it wanted to, her eyelids to fall half-staff. She lowered her high-held chin and a plaited rope came into being. Before her in the mirror she saw twenty years clamber over her and she shuddered as the icy whispering told her what lay waiting. She had delayed too long. A woman must have a showcase in which to grow old, lights, props, black velvet, children, graying and fattening, snickering and pilfering, love, protection, and small change, a serene and undemanding husband or his even more serene and less demanding will and trust fund. A woman growing old alone is useless cast-off trash, a wrinkled obscenity with no hobbled retainers to cluck and mutter over her aches and to rub her pains.

A hot spot of fear formed in her stomach. She had been lucky in her first husband. He was weak and she soon found the valve of his weakness. He was hopelessly in love with her, so much so that when she needed a divorce he did not ask for a remarriage clause in his alimony settlement.

Her second husband thought she had a private fortune and so she had. He didn’t leave her much when he died, but, with the alimony from her first husband, she could live decently, dress well, and cast about at leisure. Suppose her first husband should die! There was the fear spot. There was the night—or daymare—the monthly-check-mare.

In January she had seen him at that great wide cross of Madison Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. He looked old and gaunt. She was haunted with his mortality. If the bastard died, the money would stop. She thought she might be the only person in the world who wholeheartedly prayed for his health.

His lean, silent face and dead eyes came on her memory screen now and touched off the hot spot in her stomach. If the son of a bitch should die… !

Margie, leaning toward the mirror, paused and hurled her will like a javelin. Her chin rose; the ropes dropped back; her eyes shone; the skin snuggled close to her skull; her shoulders squared. She stood up and waltzed in a deft circle on the deep-piled red carpet. Her feet were bare, with gleaming pinkened toenails. She must rush, she must hurry, before it was too late.

She flung open her closet and laid hands on the sweet, provocative dress she had been saving for the Fourth of July weekend, the shoes with pencil heels, the stockings more sheer than no stockings at all. There was no languor in her now. She dressed as quickly and efficiently as a butcher whets his knife and she checked against a full-length mirror the way that same butcher tests his blade against his thumb. Speed but no rush, speed for the man who will not wait, and then—the casual slowness of the informed, the smart, the chic, the confident, the lady with pretty legs and immaculate white gloves. No man she passed failed to look after her. Miller Brothers’ truckdriver whistled as he lumbered by with lumber and two high-school boys leveled slitted Valentino eyes at her and painfully swallowed the saliva that flooded their half-open mouths.

“How about that?” said one.

And, “Yeah!” the other replied.

“How’d you like—”

“Yeah!”

A lady does not wander—not in New Baytown. She must be going someplace, have some business, however small and meaningless. As she walked in dotted steps along the High Street, she bowed and spoke to passers-by and reviewed them automatically.

Mr. Hall—he was living on credit, had been for some time.

Stoney—a tough, male man, but what woman could live on a cop’s salary or pension? Besides, he was her friend.

Harold Beck with real estate and plenty of it, but Harold was queer as a duck. He himself was probably the only person in the world who didn’t know it.

MacDowell—“So nice to see you, sir. How’s Milly?” Impossible—Scottish, tight, tied to his wife—an invalid, the kind who lives forever. He was a secret. No one knew what he was worth.

Dew-eyed Donald Randolph—wonderful on the next bar stool, a barroom gentleman whose manners penetrated deep into his drunkenness, but useless unless you wanted to keep house on a bar stool.

Harold Luce—it was said that he was related to the publisher of Time magazine but who said it, himself? A flinty man who had a reputation for wisdom based on his lack of the power of speech.

Ed Wantoner—a liar, a cheat, and a thief. Supposed to be loaded and his wife was dying, but Ed trusted no one. He didn’t even trust his dog not to run away. Kept it tied up and howling.

Paul Strait—a power in the Republican party. His wife was named Butterfly—not a nickname. Butterfly Strait, christened Butterfly, and that’s the truth. Paul did well if New York State had a Republican governor. He owned the city dump, where it cost a quarter to dump a load of garbage. It was told that when the rats got so bad and big as to be dangerous, Paul sold tickets for the privilege of shooting them, rented flashlights and rifles—stocked .22-caliber cartridges to shoot them with. He looked so like a president that many people called him Ike. But Danny Taylor while quietly drunk had referred to him as the Noblest Paul of them Aul, and that stuck. Noble Paul became his name when he wasn’t present.

Marullo—he’s sicker than he was. He’s gray sick. Marullo’s eyes were those of a man shot in the stomach with a .45. He had walked past the doorway of his own store without going in. Margie entered the store, bouncing her neat buttocks.

Ethan was talking to a stranger, a youngish dark-haired man, Ivy League pants and hat with a narrow brim. Fortyish, hard, tough, and devoted to whatever he was doing. He leaned over the counter and seemed about to inspect Ethan’s tonsils.

Margie said, “Hi! You’re busy. I’ll come back later.”

There are endless idle but legitimate things a strolling woman can do in a bank. Margie crossed the alley mouth and went into the marble and brushed-steel temple.

Joey Morphy lighted up the whole barred square of his teller’s window when he saw her. What a smile, what a character, what a good playmate, and what a lousy prospect as a husband. Margie properly appraised him as a born bachelor who would die fighting to remain one. No double grave for Joey.

She said, “Please, sir, do you have any fresh unsalted money?”

“Excuse me, ma’am, I’ll see. I’m almost positive I saw some somewhere. How much of it would you like to have?”

“About six ounces, m’sieur.” She took a folding book from her white kid bag and wrote a check for twenty dollars.

Joey laughed. He liked Margie. Once in a while, not too often, he took her out to dinner and laid her. But he also liked her company and her sense of play.

Joey said, “Mrs. Young-Hunt, that reminds me of a friend I had who was in Mexico with Pancho Villa.[53] Remember him?”

“Never knew him.”

“No jazz. It’s a story the guy told me. He said when Pancho was in the north, he worked the mint printing twenty-peso notes. Made so many his men stopped counting them. They weren’t so hot at counting anyway. Got to weighing them on a balance scale.”

Margie said, “Joey, you can’t resist autobiography.”

“Hell, no, Mrs. Young-Hunt. I’d have been about five years old. It’s a story. Seems a fine stacked dame, Injun but stacked, came in and said, ‘My general, you have executed my husband and left me a poor widow with five children, and is that any way to run a popular revolution?’ ”

“Pancho went over her assets the way I’m doing now.”

“You got no mortgage, Joey.”

“I know. It’s a story. Pancho said to an aide-de-camp, ‘Weigh out five kilos of money for her.’ ”

“Well, that’s quite a bundle. They tied it together with a piece of wire and the woman went out, dangling the bale of kale. Then a lieutenant stepped out and saluted and he said, ‘My general (they say it mi gral—like hral), we did not shoot her husband. He was drunk. We put him in the jail around the corner.’

“Pancho had never taken his eyes off the dame walking away with the bundle. He said, ‘Go out and shoot him. We cannot disappoint that poor widow.’ ”

“Joey, you’re impossible.”

“It’s a true story. I believe it.” He turned her check around. “Do you want this in twenties, fifties, or hundreds?”

“Give it to me in two-bitses.”

They enjoyed each other.

Mr. Baker looked out of his frosted-glass office.

Now there was a bet. Baker had made a grammatically correct but obscure pass at her once. Mr. Baker was Mr. Money. Sure he had a wife, but Margie knew the Bakers of this world. They could always raise a moral reason for doing what they wanted to do anyway. She was glad she had turned him down. It left him still in the book.

She gathered the four five-dollar bills Joey had given her and moved toward the gray banker, but at that moment the man she had seen talking to Ethan came in quietly, passed in front of her, presented a card, and was taken into Mr. Baker’s office and the door closed.

“Well, kiss my foot,” she said to Joey.

“Prettiest foot in Wessex County,” Joey said. “Want to go out tonight? Dance, eat, all that?”

“Can’t,” she said. “Who is that?”

“Never saw him before. Looks like a bank-examiner type. It’s times like this I’m glad I’m honest and even gladder I can add and subtract.”

“You know, Joey, you’re going to make some faithful woman a hell of a fine fugitive.”

“That is my prayerful hope, ma’am.”

“See you.”

She went out, crossed the alley, and entered Marullo’s grocery again.

“Hi, Eth.”

“Hello, Margie.”

“Who was the handsome stranger?”

“Don’t you carry your crystal ball?”

“Secret agent?”

“Worse than that. Margie, is everybody afraid of cops? Even if I haven’t done anything I’m scared of cops.”

“Was that curly-haired piece of the true cross a dick?”

“Not exactly. Said he was a federal man.”

“What you been up to, Ethan?”

“Up to? Me? Why ‘up to’?”

“What did he want?”

“I only know what he asked but I don’t know what he wanted.”

“What did he ask?”

“How long do I know my boss? Who else knows him? When did he come to New Baytown?”

“What did you tell him?”

“When I joined up to fight the foe, I didn’t know him. When I came back he was here. When I went broke, he took over the store and gave me a job.”

“What do you suppose it’s about?”

“God knows.”

Margie had been trying to look past his eyes. She thought, He’s pretending to be a simpleton. I wonder what the guy really wanted!

He said it so quietly it frightened her. “You don’t believe me. You know, Margie, no one ever believes the truth.”

“The whole truth? When you carve a chicken, Eth, it’s all chicken, but some is dark meat and some white.”

“I guess so. Frankly, I’m worried, Margie. I need this job. If anything happened to Alfio I’d be pounding the street.”

“Aren’t you forgetting you’re going to be rich?”

“Kind of hard to remember when I’m not.”

“Ethan, I wonder if you remember back. It was in the spring right near Easter. I came in and you called me Daughter of Jerusalem.”

“That was Good Friday.”

“You do remember. Well, I found it. It’s Matthew, and it’s pretty wonderful and—scary.”

“Yes.”

“What got into you?”

“My Great-Aunt Deborah. She got me crucified once a year. It still goes on.”

“You’re kidding. You weren’t kidding then.”

“No, I wasn’t. And I’m not now.”

She said playfully, “You know, the fortune I read you is coming true.”

“I know it is.”

“Don’t you think you owe me something?”

“Sure.”

“When are you going to pay?”

“Would you care to step into the back room?”

“I don’t think you could do it.”

“You don’t?”

“No, Ethan, and you don’t either. You’ve never had a quick jump in the hay in your life.”

“I could learn, maybe.”

“You couldn’t fornicate if you wanted to.”

“I could try.”

“It would take love or hatred to arouse you, and either one would require a slow and stately procedure.”

“Maybe you’re right. How did you know?”

“I never know how I know.”

He slid the door of the cold cabinet open, took out a Coke, which instantly grew a jacket of frost, opened it, and handed the bottle to her while he opened a second.

“What is it you want of me?”

“I’ve never known a man like that. Perhaps I want to see what it’s like to be loved or hated that much.”

“You’re a witch! Why don’t you whistle up a wind?”

“I can’t whistle. I can raise a puny little storm in most men with my eyebrows. How do I go about lighting your fire?”

“Maybe you have.”

He studied her closely and did not try to conceal his inspection. “Built like a brick outhouse,” he said, “soft and smooth and strong and good.”

“How do you know? You’ve never felt me.”

“If I ever do, you’d better run like hell.”

“My love.”

“Come off it. There’s something wrong here. I’m conceited enough to know the caliber of my attractiveness. What do you want? You’re a fine broth of a dame but you’re also smart. What do you want?”

“I told your fortune and it’s coming true.”

“And you want to suck along?”

“Yes.”

“Now I can believe you.” He raised his eyes. “Mary of my heart,” he said, “look on your husband, your lover, your dear friend. Guard me against evil from within me and from harm without. I pray for your help, my Mary, for a man has a strange and wind-troubled need and the ache of the ages is on him to spread his seeds everywhere. Ora pro me.”[54]

“You’re a fake, Ethan.”

“I know it. But can’t I be a humble fake?”

“I’m afraid of you now. I wasn’t before.”

“I can’t think why.”

She had that tarot look and he saw it.

“Marullo.”

“What about him?”

“I’m asking.”

“Be with you in a moment. Half a dozen eggs, square of butter, right. How are you for coffee?”

“Yes, a can of coffee. I like to have it on the shelf. How is that Whumpdum corned-beef hash?”

“I haven’t tried it. They say it’s very good. Be with you in a moment, Mr. Baker. Didn’t Mrs. Baker get some of that Whumpdum corned-beef hash?”

“I don’t know, Ethan. I eat what’s put before me. Mrs. Young-Hunt, you get prettier every day.”

“Kind sir.”

“It’s true. And—you dress so well.”

“I was thinking the same about you. Now you’re not pretty but you have a wonderful tailor.”

“I guess I have. He charges enough.”

“Remember the old boy who said, ‘Manners maketh man’?[55] Well that’s changed now. Tailors make men in any image they want.”

“The trouble with a well-made suit, it lasts too long. This is ten years old.”

“I can’t believe it, Mr. Baker. How is Mrs. Baker?”

“Well enough to complain. Why don’t you call on her, Mrs. Young-Hunt? She gets lonely. There aren’t many people in this generation who can carry on a literate conversation. It was Wickham who said it. It’s the motto of Winchester College.”

She turned to Ethan. “You show me another American banker who knows that.”

Mr. Baker grew ruddy. “My wife subscribed to Great Books. She’s a great reader. Please call on her.”

“I’d love to. Put my things in a bag, Mr. Hawley. I’ll pick them up on my way home.”

“Right, ma’am.”

“That’s quite a remarkable young woman,” Mr. Baker said.

“She and Mary hit it off.”

“Ethan, did that government man come here?”

“Yes.”

“What does he want?”

“I don’t know. He asked some questions about Mr. Marullo. I didn’t know the answers.”

Mr. Baker released the image of Margie as slowly as an anemone opens and casts out the shell of a sucked-clean crab. “Ethan, have you seen Danny Taylor?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I have to get in touch with him. Can’t you think where he might be?”

“I haven’t seen him for—well, since May. He was going to try the cure again.”

“Do you know where?”

“He didn’t say. But he wanted to try.”

“Was it a public institution?”

“I don’t think so, sir. He borrowed some money from me.”

“What!”

“I loaned him a little money.”

“How much?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry, Ethan. You are old friends. Sorry. Did he have other money?”

“I think so.”

“You don’t know how much?”

“No sir. I just had a feeling he had more.”

“If you know where he is, please tell me.”

“I would if I knew, Mr. Baker. Maybe you could make a list of the places and phone.”

“Did he borrow cash?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s no good. He’d change his name.”

“Why?”

“They always do from good families. Ethan, did you get the money from Mary?”

“Yes.”

“She didn’t mind?”

“She didn’t know.”

“Now you’re being smart.”

“I learned from you, sir.”

“Well, don’t forget it.”

“Maybe I’m learning little by little. Mostly I’m learning how much I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s healthy. Is Mary well?”

“Oh, she’s strong and tough. Wish I could take her on a little vacation. We haven’t been out of town in years.”

“That will come, Ethan. I think I’ll go to Maine over the Fourth of July. I can’t take the noise any more.”

“I guess you bankers are the lucky ones. Weren’t you in Albany lately?”

“What gave you that idea?”

“I don’t know—heard it someplace. Maybe Mrs. Baker told Mary.”

“She couldn’t. She didn’t know it. Try to think where you heard it.”

“Maybe I only imagined it.”

“This troubles me, Ethan. Think hard where you heard it.”

“I can’t, sir. What does it matter if it isn’t true?”

“I’ll tell you in confidence why I’m worried. It’s because it is true. The Governor called me in. It’s a serious matter. I wonder where the leak could be.”

“Anyone see you there?”

“Not that I know of. I flew in and out. This is serious. I’m going to tell you something. If it gets out I’ll know where it came from.”

“Then I don’t want to hear it.”

“You haven’t any choice now that you know about Albany. The state is looking into county and town affairs.”

“Why?”

“I guess because the smell has got as far as Albany.”

“No politics?”

“I guess anything the Governor does can be called politics.”

“Mr. Baker, why can’t it be in the open?”

“I’ll tell you why. Upstate the word got out and by the time the examiners got to work most of the records had disappeared.”

“I see. I wish you hadn’t told me. I’m not a talker but I wish I didn’t know.”

“For that matter, I wish the same thing, Ethan.”

“The election is July seventh. Will it break before that?”

“I don’t know. That’s up to the state.”

“Do you suppose Marullo is mixed in it? I can’t afford to lose my job.”

“I don’t think so. That was a federal man. Department of Justice. Didn’t you ask for his credentials?”

“Didn’t think of it. He flashed them but I didn’t look.”

“Well, you should. You always should.”

“I wouldn’t think you’d want to go away.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter. Nothing happens over Fourth of July weekend. Why, the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor on a weekend. They knew everyone would be away.”

“I wish I could take Mary someplace.”

“Maybe you can later. I want you to whip your brains and try to find where Taylor is.”

“Why? Is it so important?”

“It is. I can’t tell you why right now.”

“I sure wish I could find him, then.”

“Well, if you could turn him up maybe you wouldn’t need this job.”

“If it’s that way, I’ll sure try, sir.”

“That’s the boy, Ethan. I’m sure you will. And if you do locate him, you call me—any time, day or night.”

Chapter thirteen

I wonder about people who say they haven’t time to think. For myself, I can double think. I find that weighing vegetables, passing the time of day with customers, fighting or loving Mary, coping with the children—none of these prevents a second and continuing layer of thinking, wondering, conjecturing. Surely this must be true of everyone. Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.

In the strange, uncharted country I had entered, perhaps I had no choice. Questions boiled up, demanding to be noticed. And it was a world so new to me that I puzzled over matters old residents probably solved and put away when they were children.

I had thought I could put a process in motion and control it at every turn—even stop it when I wanted to. And now the frightening conviction grew in me that such a process may become a thing in itself, a person almost, having its own ends and means and quite independent of its creator. And another troublesome thought came in. Did I really start it, or did I simply not resist it? I may have been the mover, but was I not also the moved? Once on the long street, there seemed to be no cross-roads, no forked paths, no choice.

The choice was in the first evaluation. What are morals? Are they simply words? Was it honorable to assess my father’s weakness, which was a generous mind and the ill-founded dream that other men were equally generous? No, it was simply good business to dig the pit for him. He fell into it himself. No one pushed him. Was it immoral to strip him when he was down? Apparently not.

Now a slow, deliberate encirclement was moving on New Baytown, and it was set in motion by honorable men. If it succeeded, they would be thought not crooked but clever. And if a factor they had overlooked moved in, would that be immoral or dishonorable? I think that would depend on whether or not it was successful. To most of the world success is never bad. I remember how, when Hitler moved unchecked and triumphant, many honorable men sought and found virtues in him. And Mussolini made the trains run on time, and Vichy collaborated for the good of France, and whatever else Stalin was, he was strong. Strength and success—they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn’t seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught. In the move designed for New Baytown some men had to get hurt, some even destroyed, but this in no way deterred the movement.

I could not call this a struggle with my conscience. Once I perceived the pattern and accepted it, the path was clearly marked and the dangers apparent. What amazed me most was that it seemed to plan itself; one thing grew out of another and everything fitted together. I watched it grow and only guided it with the lightest touch.

What I had done and planned to do was undertaken with full knowledge that it was foreign to me, but necessary as a stirrup is to mount a tall horse. But once I had mounted, the stirrup would not be needed. Maybe I could not stop this process, but I need never start another. I did not need or want to be a citizen of this gray and dangerous country. I had nothing to do with the coming tragedy of July 7. It was not my process, but I could anticipate and I could use it.

One of our oldest and most often disproved myths is that a man’s thoughts show in his face, that the eyes are the windows of the soul. It isn’t so. Only sickness shows, or defeat or despair, which are different kinds of sickness. Some rare people can feel beneath, can sense a change or hear a secret signal. I think my Mary felt a change, but she misinterpreted it, and I think Margie Young-Hunt knew—but she was a witch and that is a worrisome thing. It seemed to me that she was intelligent as well as magic—and that’s even more worrisome.

I felt sure that Mr. Baker would go on a holiday, probably on Friday afternoon of the Fourth of July weekend. The storm would have to break Friday or Saturday to give it time to take effect before election and it was logical to suppose that Mr. Baker would want to be away when the shock came. Of course that didn’t matter much to me. It was more an exercise in anticipation, but it did make several moves necessary on Thursday, just in case he left that night. My Saturday matter was so finely practical that I could move through it in my sleep. If I had any fear of that, it was more like a small stage fright.

On Monday, June 27, Marullo came in soon after I had opened up. He walked about, looking strangely at the shelves, the cash register, the cold counter, and he walked back to the storeroom and looked about. You would have thought from his expression that he was seeing it for the first time.

I said, “Going to take a trip over the Fourth?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, everybody does who can afford it.”

“Oh! Where would I go?”

“Where’s anybody go? Catskills, even out to Montauk and fish. School tuna running.”

The very thought of fighting a thirty-pound plunging fish drove arthritic pains up his arms so that he flexed them and winced.

I very nearly asked him when he planned to go to Italy, but that seemed too much. Instead, I moved over to him and took him gently by his right elbow. “Alfio,” I said, “I think you’re nuts. Why don’t you go into New York to the best specialist? There must be something to stop that pain.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“What have you got to lose? Go ahead. Try it.”

“What do you care?”

“I don’t. But I’ve worked here a long time for a stupid son of a bitch dago. If a yellow dog hurt that much, I’d get to feeling it myself. You come in here and move your arms and it’s half an hour before I can straighten up.”

“You like me?”

“Hell, no. I’m buttering you up for a raise.”

He looked at me with hound’s eyes, rimmed with red, and dark brown iris and pupil all one piece. He seemed about to say something but changed his mind about it. “You’re a good kid,” he said.

“Don’t depend on it.”

“A good kid!” he said explosively and as though shocked by his show of emotion he went out of the store and walked away.

I was weighing out two pounds of string beans for Mrs. Davidson when Marullo came charging back. He stood in the doorway and shouted at me.

“You take my Pontiac.”

“What?”

“Go someplace Sunday and Monday.”

“I can’t afford it.”

“You take the kids. I told the garage for you to get my Pontiac. Tank full of gas.”

“Wait a minute.”

“You go to hell. Take the kids.” He tossed something like a spitball at me and it fell among the string beans. Mrs. Davidson watched him plunge away again down the street. I picked the green wad from the string beans—three twenty-dollar bills folded in a tight square.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s an excitable Italian.”

“He must be, throwing money!”

He didn’t show up the rest of the week, so that was all right. He’d never gone away before without telling me. It was like watching a parade go by, just standing and watching it go by and knowing what the next float would be but watching for it just the same.

I hadn’t expected the Pontiac. He never loaned his car to anybody. It was a strange time. Some outside force or design seemed to have taken control of events so that they were crowded close the way cattle are in a loading chute. I know the opposite can be true. Sometimes the force or design deflects and destroys, no matter how careful and deep the planning. I guess that’s why we believe in luck and unluck.

On Thursday, the thirtieth of June, I awakened as usual in the black pearl light of the dawn, and that was early now in the lap of midsummer. Chair and bureau were dark blobs and pictures only lighter suggestions. The white window curtains seemed to sigh in and out as though they breathed, because it’s a rare dawn that does not wave a small wind over the land.

Coming out of sleep, I had the advantage of two worlds, the layered firmament of dream and the temporal fixtures of the mind awake. I stretched luxuriously—a good and tingling sensation. It’s as though the skin has shrunk in the night and one must push it out to daytime size by bulging the muscles, and there’s an itching pleasure in it.

First I referred to my remembered dreams as I would glance through a newspaper to see if there was anything of interest or import. Then I explored the coming day for events that had not happened. Next I followed a practice learned from the best officer I ever had. He was Charley Edwards, a major of middling age, perhaps a little too far along to be a combat officer but he was a good one. He had a large family, a pretty wife and four children in steps, and his heart could ache with love and longing for them if he allowed it to. He told me about it. In his deadly business he could not afford to have his attention warped and split by love, and so he had arrived at a method. In the morning, that is if he were not jerked from sleep by an alert, he opened his mind and heart to his family. He went over each one in turn, how they looked, what they were like; he caressed them and reassured them of his love. It was as though he picked precious things one by one from a cabinet, looked at each, felt it, kissed it, and put it back; and last he gave them a small good-by and shut the door of the cabinet. The whole thing took half an hour if he could get it and then he didn’t have to think of them again all day. He could devote his full capacity, untwisted by conflicting thought and feeling, to the job he had to do—the killing of men. He was the best officer I ever knew. I asked his permission to use his method and he gave it to me. When he was killed, all I could think was that his had been a good and effective life. He had taken his pleasure, savored his love, and paid his debts, and how many people even approached that?

I didn’t always use Major Charley’s method, but on a day like this Thursday, when I knew my attention should be as uninterrupted as possible, I awakened when the day opened its door a crack and I visited my family as Major Charley had.

I visited them in chronological order, bowed to Aunt Deborah. She was named for Deborah the Judge of Israel[56] and I have read that a judge was a military leader. Perhaps she responded to her name. My great-aunt could have led armies. She did marshal the cohorts of thought. My joy in learning for no visible profit came from her. Stern though she was, she was charged with curiosity and had little use for anyone who was not. I gave her my obeisance. I offered a spectral toast to old Cap’n and ducked my head to my father. I even made my duty to the untenanted hole in the past I knew as my mother. I never knew her. She died before I could, and left only a hole in the past where she should be.

One thing troubled me. Aunt Deborah and old Cap’n and my father would not come clear. Their outlines were vague and wavery where they should have been sharp as photographs. Well, perhaps the mind fades in its memories as old tintypes do—the background reaching out to engulf the subjects. I couldn’t hold them forever.

Mary should have been next but I laid her aside for later.

I raised Allen. I could not find his early face, the face of joy and excitement that made me sure of the perfectability of man. He appeared what he had become—sullen, conceited, resentful, remote and secret in the pain and perplexity of his pubescence, a dreadful, harrowing time when he must bite everyone near, even himself, like a dog in a trap. Even in my mind’s picture he could not come out of his miserable discontent, and I put him aside, only saying to him, I know. I remember how bad it is and I can’t help. No one can. I can only tell you it will be over. But you can’t believe that. Go in peace—go with my love even though during this time we can’t stand each other.

Ellen brought a surge of pleasure. She will be pretty, prettier even than her mother, because when her little face jells into its final shape she will have the strange authority of Aunt Deborah. Her moods, her cruelties, her nervousness are the ingredients of a being quite beautiful and dear. I know, because I saw her standing in her sleep holding the pink talisman to her little breast and looking a woman fulfilled. And as the talisman was important and still is to me, so it is to Ellen. Maybe it is Ellen who will carry and pass on whatever is immortal in me. And in my greeting I put my arms around her and she, true to form, tickled my ear and giggled. My Ellen. My daughter.

I turned my head to Mary, sleeping and smiling on my right. That is her place so that, when it is good and right and ready, she can shelter her head on my right arm, leaving my left hand free for caressing.

A few days before, I snicked my forefinger with the curved banana knife at the store, and a callusy scab toughened the ball of my fingertip. And so I stroked the lovely line from ear to shoulder with my second finger but gently enough not to startle and firmly enough not to tickle. She sighed as she always does, a deep, gathered breath and a low release of luxury. Some people resent awakening, but not Mary. She comes to a day with expectancy that it will be good. And, knowing this, I try to offer some small gift to justify her conviction. And I try to hold back gifts for occasions, such as the one I now produced from my mind’s purse.

Her eyes opened, hazed with sleep. “Already?” she asked, and she glanced at the window to see how near the day had come. Over the bureau the picture hangs—trees and a lake and a small cow standing in the water of the lake. I made out the cow’s tail from my bed, and knew the day had come.

“I bring you tidings of great joy, my flying squirrel.”

“Crazy.”

“Have I ever lied to you?”

“Maybe.”

“Are you awake enough to hear the tidings of great joy?”

“No.”

“Then I will withhold them.”

She turned on her left shoulder and made a deep crease in her soft flesh. “You joke so much. If it’s like you’re going to cement over the lawn—”

“I am not.”

“Or you’re starting a cricket farm—”

“No. But you do remember old discarded plans.”

“Is it a joke?”

“Well, it’s a thing so strange and magic that you are going to have to buttress your belief.”

Her eyes were clear and wakeful now and I could see the little trembles around her lips preparing for laughter. “Tell me.”

“Do you know a man of Eyetalian extraction named Marullo?”

“Crazy—you’re being silly.”

“You will find it so. Said Marullo has gone from here for a time.”

“Where?”

“He didn’t say.”

“When will he be back?”

“Stop confusing me. He didn’t say that either. What he did say and, when I protested, what he ordered was that we should take his car and go on a happy trip over the holiday.”

“You’re joking me.”

“Would I tell a lie that would make you sad?”

“But why?”

“That I can’t tell you. What I can swear to from Boy Scout oath to papal oath is that the mink-lined Pontiac with a tank full of virgin gasoline awaits your highness’s pleasure.”

“But where shall we go?”

“That, my lovely insect-wife, is what you are going to decide, and take all day today, tomorrow, and Saturday to plan it.”

“But Monday’s a holiday. That’s two full days.”

“That’s correct.”

“Can we afford it? It might mean a motel or something.”

“Can or not, we will. I have a secret purse.”

“Silly, I know your purse. I can’t imagine him lending his car.”

“Neither can I, but he did.”

“Don’t forget he brought candy Easter.”

“Perhaps it is senility.”

“I wonder what he wants.”

“That’s not worthy of my wife. Perhaps he wants us to love him.”

“I’ll have to do a thousand things.”

“I know you will.” I could see her mind plowing into the possibilities like a bulldozer. I knew I had lost her attention and probably couldn’t get it back, and that was good.

At breakfast before my second cup of coffee she had picked up and discarded half the pleasure areas of eastern America. Poor darling hadn’t had much fun these last few years.

I said, “Chloe, I know I’m going to have trouble getting your attention. A very important investment is offered. I want some more of your money. The first is doing well.”

“Does Mr. Baker know about it?”

“It’s his idea.”

“Then take it. You sign a check.”

“Don’t you want to know how much?”

“I guess so.”

“Don’t you want to know what the investment is? The figures, the flotage, the graphs, the probable return, the fiscal dinkum, and all that?”

“I wouldn’t understand it.”

“Oh, yes you would.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to understand it.”

“No wonder they call you the Vixen of Wall Street. That ice-cold, diamond-sharp business mind—it’s frightening.”

“We’re going on a trip,” she said. “We’re going on a trip for two days.”

And how the hell could a man not love her, not adore her? “Who is Mary—what is she?” I sang and collected the empty milk bottles and went to work.

I felt the need to catch up with Joey, just to get the feel of him, but I must have been a moment late or he a moment early. He was entering the coffee shop when I turned into the High Street. I followed him in and took the stool beside him. “You got me into this habit, Joey.”

“Hi, Mr. Hawley. It’s pretty good coffee.”

I greeted my old school girl friend. “Morning, Annie.”

“You going to be a regular, Eth?”

“Looks like. One cuppa and black.”

“Black it is.”

“Black as the eye of despair.”

“What?”

“Black.”

“You see any white in that, Eth, I’ll give you another.”

“How are things, Morph?”

“Just the same, only worse.”

“Want to trade jobs?”

“I would, just before a long weekend.”

“You’re not the only one with problems. People stock up on food too.”

“I guess they do. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Picnic stuff, pickles, sausages, and, God help us, marshmallows. This a big one for you?”

“With the Fourth on Monday and nice weather, you kidding? And what makes it worse, God Almighty feels the need of rest and recreation in the mountains.”

“Mr. Baker?”

“Not James G. Blaine.”[57]

“I want to see him. I need to see him.”

“Well, try to catch him if you can. He’s jumping like a quarter in a tambourine.”

“I can bring sandwiches to your battle station, Joey.”

“I might just ask you to.”

“I pay this time,” I said.

“Okay.”

We crossed the street together and went into the alley. “You sound lowy, Joey.”

“I am. I get pretty tired of other people’s money. I got a hot date for the weekend and I’ll probably be too pooped to warm up to it.” He nudged a gum wrapper into the lock, went in, saying, “See you,” and closed the door. I pushed the back door open. “Joey! You want a sandwich today?”

“No thanks,” he called out of the dim, floor-oil-smelling interior. “Maybe Friday, Saturday sure.”

“Don’t you close at noon?”

“I told you. The bank closes but Morphy don’t.”

“Just call on me.”

“Thanks—thanks, Mr. Hawley.”

I had nothing to say to my forces on the shelves that morning except “Good morning gentlemen—at ease!” At a few moments before nine, aproned and broomed, I was out front, sweeping the sidewalk.

Mr. Baker is so regular you can hear him tick and I’m sure there’s a hairspring in his chest. Eight fifty-six, fifty-seven, there he came down Elm Street; eight fifty-eight, he crossed; eight fifty-nine—he was at the glass doors, where I, with broom at carry arms, intercepted him. “Mr. Baker, I want to talk to you.”

“Morning, Ethan. Can you wait a minute? Come on in.”

I followed him, and it was just as Joey said—like a religious ceremony. They practically stood at attention as the clock hand crossed nine. There came a click and buzzing from the great steel safe door. Then Joey dialed the mystic numbers and turned the wheel that drew the bolts. The holy of holies swung stately open and Mr. Baker took the salute of the assembled money. I stood outside the rail like a humble communicant waiting for the sacrament.

Mr. Baker turned. “Now, Ethan. What can I do for you?”

I said softly, “I want to talk to you privately, and I can’t leave the store.”

“Won’t it wait?”

“ ’Fraid not.”

“You ought to have some help.”

“I know it.”

“If I get a moment I’ll drop over. Any word about Taylor?”

“Not yet. But I’ve put out some lines.”

“I’ll try to get over.”

“Thank you, sir.” But I knew he would come.

And he did, in less than an hour, and stood about until the present customers were gone.

“Now—what is it, Ethan?”

“Mr. Baker, with a doctor or a lawyer or a priest there’s a rule of secrecy. Is there such a thing with a banker?”

He smiled. “Have you ever heard a banker discuss a client’s interests, Ethan?”

“No.”

“Well, ask sometime and see how far you get. And besides that custom, I’m your friend, Ethan.”

“I know. I guess I’m a little jumpy. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a break.”

“A break?”

“I’ll lay them out face up, Mr. Baker. Marullo’s in trouble.”

He moved close to me. “What kind of trouble.”

“I don’t know exactly, sir. I think it might be illegal entry.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me—not in so many words. You know how he is.”

I could almost see his mind leaping about, picking up pieces and fitting them together. “Go on,” he said. “That’s deportation.”

“I’m afraid so. He’s been good to me, Mr. Baker. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt him.”

“You owe yourself something, Ethan. What was his proposition?”

“It’s not merely a proposition. I had to put it together out of a lot of excited gobbledegook. But I gathered that if I had a quick five thousand in cash, I could own the store.”

“That sounds as if he’s going to run for it—but you don’t know that.”

“I don’t know anything really.”

“So there’s no chance of a collusion charge. He didn’t tell you anything specific.”

“No, sir.”

“Then how did you arrive at that figure?”

“Easy, sir. That’s all we’ve got.”

“But you might get it for less?”

“Maybe.”

His quick eye went over the store and valued it. “If you are right in your assumption you’re in a good bargaining position.”

“I’m not much good at that.”

“You know I don’t favor under-the-table deals. Maybe I could talk to him.”

“He’s out of town.”

“When will he be back?”

“I don’t know, sir. Remember, it’s only my impression he might drop in, and if I had cash, he might deal. He likes me, you know.”

“I know he does.”

“I’d hate to think I was taking advantage.”

“He can always get it from someone else. He could get ten thousand easy from—anybody.”

“Then maybe I’m overhopeful.”

“Now, don’t think small. You have to look after number one.”

“Number two. It’s Mary’s money.”

“So it is. Well, what did you have in mind?”

“Well, I thought you could maybe draw some papers up and leave the date and the amount blank. Then I thought I’d draw the money Friday.”

“Why Friday?”

“Well, again it’s only a guess, but he did say something about how everybody’s away over the holiday. I kind of figured he might show up then. Don’t you have his account?”

“No, by God. He drew it out just recently. Buying stocks, he said. I didn’t think anything of it because he’s done that before and always brought back more than he took out.” He looked full in the eyes of a high-colored Miss Rheingold[58] on the cold counter, but he didn’t respond to her laughing invitation. “You know you could take a terrible beating on this?”

“How do you mean?”

“For one thing, he could sell it to half a dozen different people and, for another, it might be neck-deep in mortgage. And no title search.”

“I could maybe find out in the county clerk’s office. I know how busy you are, Mr. Baker. I’m taking advantage of your friendship for my family. Besides, you’re the only friend I have who knows about such things.”

“I’ll call Tom Watson about the title deed. Damn it, Ethan, it’s a bad time. I want to take a little trip tomorrow night. If it’s true and he’s a crook, you could be taken. Taken to the cleaners.”

“Maybe I better give it up, then. But good God, Mr. Baker, I’m tired of being a grocery clerk.”

“I didn’t say give it up. I said you’re taking a chance.”

“Mary would be so happy if I owned the store. But I guess you’re right. I shouldn’t gamble with her money. I suppose what I should do is call up the federal men.”

“That would lose you any advantage you have.”

“How?”

“If he is deported he can sell his holdings through an agent and this store will bring a lot more than you can pay. You don’t know he’s going to jump. How could you tell them he is if you don’t know? You don’t even know he’s picked up.”

“That’s true.”

“As a matter of fact, you don’t know anything about him—really know. All you’ve told me is vague suspicions, isn’t that so?”

“Yes.”

“And you’d better forget those.”

“Wouldn’t it look bad—paying in cash with no record?”

“You could write on the check—oh, something like ‘For investment in grocery business with A. Marullo.’ That would be a record of your intention.”

“Suppose none of this works.”

“Then redeposit the money.”

“You think it’s worth the risk?”

“Well—everything’s a risk, Ethan. It’s a risk to carry that much money around.”

“I’ll take care of that.”

“I wish I didn’t have to be out of town.”

What I said about timing still held. In all that time nobody came into the store, but half a dozen came in now—three women, an old man, and two kids. Mr. Baker moved close and spoke softly. “I’ll make it in hundred-dollar bills and note the numbers. Then if they catch him you can get it back.” He nodded gravely to the three women, said, “Good morning, George,” to the old man, and roughed his fingers through the kids’ coarse hair. Mr. Baker is a very clever man.

Chapter fourteen

July first. It parts the year like the part in a head of hair. I had foreseen it as a boundary marker for me—yesterday one kind of me, tomorrow a different kind. I had made my moves that could not be recalled. Time and incidents had played along, had seemed to collaborate with me. I did not ever draw virtue down to hide what I was doing from myself. No one made me take the course I had chosen. Temporarily I traded a habit of conduct and attitude for comfort and dignity and a cushion of security. It would be too easy to agree that I did it for my family because I knew that in their comfort and security I would find my dignity. But my objective was limited and, once achieved, I could take back my habit of conduct. I knew I could. War did not make a killer of me, although for a time I killed men. Sending out patrols, knowing some of the men would die, aroused no joy in sacrifice in me as it did in some, and I could never joy in what I had done, nor excuse or condone it. The main thing was to know the limited objective for what it was, and, once it was achieved, to stop the process in its tracks. But that could only be if I knew what I was doing and did not fool myself—security and dignity, and then stop the process in its tracks. I knew from combat that casualties are the victims of a process, not of anger nor of hate or cruelty. And I believe that in the moment of acceptance, between winner and loser, between killer and killed, there is love.

But Danny’s scribbled papers hurt like a sorrow, and Marullo’s grateful eyes.

I had not lain awake as men are said to do on the eve of battle. Sleep came quickly, heavily, completely, and released me just as freely in the predawn, refreshed. I did not lie in the darkness as usual. My urge was to visit my life as it had been. I slipped quietly from bed, dressed in the bathroom, and went down the stairs, walking near to the wall. It did surprise me when I went to the cabinet, unlocked it, and recognized the rosy mound by touch. I put it in my pocket and closed and locked the cabinet. In my whole life I had never carried it away and I had not known I would do it this morning. Memory directed me through the dark kitchen and out the back door into the graying yard. The arching elms were fat with leaves, a true black cave. If I had then had Marullo’s Pontiac I would have driven out of New Baytown to the awakening world of my first memory. My finger traced the endless sinuous design on the flesh-warm talisman in my pocket—talisman?

That Deborah who sent me as a child to Golgotha[59] was a precise machine with words. She took no nonsense from them nor permitted me a laxity. What power she had, that old woman! If she wanted immortality, she had it in my brain. Seeing me trace the puzzle with my finger, she said, “Ethan, that outlandish thing could well become your talisman.”

“What’s a talisman?”

“If I tell you, your half-attention will only half learn. Look it up.”

So many words are mine because Aunt Deborah first aroused my curiosity and then forced me to satisfy it by my own effort. Of course I replied, “Who cares?” But she knew I would creep to it alone and she spelled it so I could track it down. T-a-l-i-s-m-a-n. She cared deeply about words and she hated their misuse as she would hate the clumsy handling of any fine thing. Now, so many cycles later, I can see the page—can see myself misspelling “talisman.” The Arabic was only a squiggly line with a bulb on the end of it. The Greek I could pronounce because of the blade of that old woman. “A stone or other object engraved with figures or characters to which are attributed the occult powers of the planetary influences and celestial configurations under which it was made, usually worn as an amulet to avert evil from or bring fortune to the bearer.” I had then to look for “occult,” “planetary,” “celestial,” and “amulet.” It was always that way. One word set off others like a string of firecrackers.

When later I asked her, “Do you believe in talismans?” she replied, “What has my belief to do with it?”

I put it in her hands. “What does this figure or character mean?”

“It’s your talisman, not mine. It means what you want it to mean. Put it back in the cabinet. It will wait for you.”

Now, as I walked in the cavern of the elms, she was as alive as ever she had been and that’s true immortality. Over and under itself the carving went, and around and over and under, a serpent with neither head nor tail nor beginning nor ending. And I had taken it away with me for the first time—to avert evil? To bring fortune? I don’t believe in fortune-telling either, and immortality has always felt to me like a sickly promise for the disappointed.

The light-rimmed boundary of the east was July, for June had gone away in the night. July is brass where June is gold, and lead where June is silver. July leaves are heavy and fat and crowding. Birdsong of July is a flatulent refrain without passion, for the nests are empty now and dumpy fledglings teeter clumsily. No, July is not a month of promise or of fulfillment. Fruit is growing but unsweet and uncolored, corn is a limp green bundle with a young and yellow tassel. The squashes still wear umbilical crowns of dry blossom.

I walked to Porlock Street, Porlock the plump and satisfied. The gathering brass of dawn showed rosebushes heavy with middle-aged blooms, like women whose corseting no longer conceals a thickening stomach, no matter how pretty their legs may remain.

Walking slowly, I found myself not saying but feeling goodby—not farewell. Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.

I came to the Old Harbor. Good-by to what? I don’t know. I couldn’t remember. I think I wanted to go to the Place, but man commensal with the sea would know that the tide was at flood and the Place under dark water. Last night I saw the moon only four days grown like a thickened, curved surgeon’s needle, but strong enough to pull the tide into the cave mouth of the Place.

No need to visit Danny’s shack in hope. The light had come enough to see the grasses standing upright in the path where Danny’s feet had stumbled them flat.

Old Harbor was flecked with summer craft, slim hulls with sails covered in grommeted coats of canvas, and here and there a morning man made ready, clearing boom and coiling jib- and mainsheets, unbagging his Genoa like a great white rumpled nest.

The new harbor was busier. Charter boats tied close for boarding passengers, the frantic summer fishermen who pay a price and glut the decks with fish and in the afternoon wonder vaguely what to do with them, sacks and baskets and mountains of porgies and blows and blackfish, sea robins, and even slender dog-fish, all to be torn up greedily, to die, and to be thrown back for the waiting gulls. The gulls swarm and wait, knowing the summer fishermen will sicken of their plenty. Who wants to clean and scale a sack of fish? It’s harder to give away fish than it is to catch them.

The bay was oil-smooth now and the brass light poured over it. The cans and nuns stood unswaying on the channel edge, each one with its mirror twin upside down below it in the water.

I turned at the flagpole and war memorial and found my name among the surviving heroes, the letters picked out in silver—CAPT. E. A. HAWLEY—and below in gold the names of the eighteen New Baytown men who didn’t make it home. I knew the names of most of them and once I knew the men—no different then from the rest, but different now in gold. For a brief moment I wished I could be with them in the lower files, Capt. E. A. Hawley in gold, the slobs and malingerers, the cowards and the heroes all lumped together in gold. Not only the brave get killed, but the brave have a better chance at it.

Fat Willie drove up and parked beside the monument and took the flag from the seat beside him.

“Hi, Eth,” he said. He shackled the brass grommets and raised the flag slowly to the top of the staff, where it slumped limp as a hanged man. “She barely made it,” Willie said, pantinga little. “Look at her. Two more days for her, and then the new one goes up.”

“The fifty-star?”[60]

“You bet. We got a nylon, big devil, twice as big as this and don’t weigh no more than half.”

“How’s tricks, Willie?”

“I can’t complain—but I do. This glorious Fourth is always a mess. Coming on a Monday, there’ll be just that much more accidents and fights and drunks—out-of-town drunks. Want a lift up to the store?”

“Thanks. I’ve got to stop at the post office and I thought I’d get a cup of coffee.”

“Okay. I’ll ride you. I’d even coffee you but Stoney’s mean as a bull bitch.”

“What’s his problem?”

“God knows. Went away a couple of days and he come back mean and tough.”

“Where’d he go?”

“He didn’t say, but he come back mean. I’ll wait while you get your mail.”

“Don’t bother, Willie. I’ve got to address some things.”

“Suit yourself.” He backed out and slid away up the High Street.

The post office was still dusky and the floor newly oiled, and a sign up: DANGER. SLICK FLOOR.

We’d had Number 7 drawer since the old post office was built. I dialed G ½ R and took out a pile of plans and promises addressed to “Box-Holder.” And that’s all there was—wastebasket fodder. I strolled up the High, intending to have a cup of coffee, but at the last moment I didn’t want it, or didn’t want to talk, or—I don’t know why. I just didn’t want to go to the Foremaster coffee shop. Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is—and a woman too, I guess.

I was sweeping the sidewalk when Mr. Baker ticked out of Elm Street and went in for the ceremony of the time lock. And I was halfheartedly arranging muskmelons in the doorway stands when the old-fashioned green armored car pulled up in front of the bank. Two guards armed like commandos got out of the back and carried gray sacks of money into the bank. In about ten minutes they came out and got into the riveted fortress and it drove away. I guess they had to stand by while Morph counted it and Mr. Baker checked and gave a receipt. It’s an awful lot of trouble taking care of money. As Morph says, you could get a downright distaste for other people’s money. And by the size and weight, the bank must have anticipated a large holiday withdrawal. If I was a run-of-the-mill bank robber, now would be the time to stick it up. But I wasn’t a run-of-the-mill bank robber. I owed everything I knew to Pal Joey. He could have been a great one if he had wished. I did wonder why he didn’t want to, just to try out his theory.

Business piled up that morning. It was worse than I had thought it might be. The sun turned hot and fierce and very little wind moved, the kind of weather that drives people on their vacations whether they want to go or not. I had a line of customers waiting to be served. One thing I knew, come hell or high water, I had to get some help. If Allen didn’t work out, I’d fire him and get someone else.

When Mr. Baker came in about eleven, he was in a hurry. I had to stand off some customers and go into the storeroom with him.

He put a big envelope and a small one in my hands, and he was so rushed that he barked a kind of shorthand. “Tom Watson says the deed’s okay. He doesn’t know whether it’s papered. He doesn’t think so. Here are conveyances. Get signatures where I’ve checked. The money’s marked and the numbers noted. Here’s a check all made out. Just sign it. Sorry I have to rush, Ethan. I hate doing business like this.”

“You really think I should go ahead?”

“Goddammit, Ethan, after all the trouble I’ve gone to—”

“Sorry, sir. Sorry. I know you’re right.” I put the check on a canned-milk carton and signed it with my indelible pencil.

Mr. Baker wasn’t too rushed to inspect the check. “Offer two thousand at first. And raise your offer two hundred at a time. You realize, of course, you’ve only got a five-hundred balance in the bank. God help you if you run short.”

“If it’s clear, can’t I borrow on the store?”

“Sure you can if you want interest to eat you up.”

“I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Don’t go soft, Ethan. Don’t let him poor-mouth you. He can be a spellbinder. All dagos can. Just remember number one.”

“I am sure grateful.”

“Got to go,” he said. “Want to hit the highway before the noon traffic.” And out he went and nearly knocked Mrs. Willow down in the doorway where she had been over every cantaloupe twice.

The day didn’t get any less frantic. I guess the heat that splashed the streets made people edgy and downright quarrelsome. Instead of a holiday, you’d have thought they were stocking up for a catastrophe. I couldn’t have got a sandwich over to the Morph if I’d wanted to.

I not only had to wait on people, I had to keep my eyes open. A lot of the customers were summer people, strangers in town, and they steal if you don’t watch them. They can’t seem to help it. And it’s not always stuff they need either. The little jars of luxuries take the worst beating, foie gras and caviar and button mushrooms. That’s why Marullo had me keep such stuff back of the counter, where the customers aren’t supposed to go. He taught me it’s not good business to catch a shoplifter. Makes everyone restless, maybe because—well, in his thoughts anyway—everyone is guilty. About the only way is to charge the loss off to somebody else. But if I saw someone drifting too close to certain shelves, I could forestall the impulse by saying, “Those cocktail onions are a bargain.” I’ve seen the customer jump as though I’d read his mind. What I hate worst about it is the suspicion. It’s unpleasant to be suspicious. Makes me angry, as though one person were injuring many.

The day wore on to a kind of sadness, and time slowed down. After five Chief Stoney came in, lean and grim and ulcerish. He bought a TV dinner—country steak, carrots, mashed potatoes, cooked and frozen in a kind of aluminum tray.

I said, “You look like you had a touch of sun, Chief.”

“Well, I ain’t. I feel fine.” He looked miserable.

“Want two of those?”

“Just one. My wife’s gone visiting. A cop don’t get holidays.”

“Too bad.”

“Maybe it’s just as well. With this mob hanging around, I don’t get home much.”

“I heard you were away.”

“Who told you?”

“Willie.”

“He better learn to keep his big mouth shut.”

“He didn’t mean harm.”

“Hasn’t got brains enough to mean harm. Maybe not brains enough to stay out of jail.”

“Who has?” I said it on purpose and I got even more response than I had anticipated.

“Just what do you mean by that, Ethan?”

“I mean we’ve got so many laws you can’t breathe without breaking something.”

“That’s the truth. Gets so you don’t really know.”

“I was going to ask you, Chief—cleaning up, I found an old revolver, all dirty and rusty. Marullo says it’s not his, and it sure isn’t mine. What do I do with it?”

“Turn it over to me, if you don’t want to apply for a license.”

“I’ll bring it down from home tomorrow. I stuck it in a can of oil. What do you do with things like that, Stoney?”

“Oh, check to see if they’re hot and then throw them in the ocean.” He seemed to be feeling better, but it had been a long, hot day. I couldn’t let him be.

“Remember a couple of years ago there was a case somewhere upstate? Police were selling confiscated guns.”

Stoney smiled the sweet smile of an alligator and with the same gay innocence. “I had one hell of a week, Eth. One hell of a week. If you’re going about needling me, why, don’t do it, because I’ve had one hell of a week.”

“Sorry, Chief. Anything a sober citizen can do to help, like getting drunk with you?”

“I wish to Christ I could. I’d rather get drunk than anything I can think of.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Do you know? No, how could you? If I only knew what it’s for and where it’s from.”

“What you talking about?”

“Forget it, Eth. No—don’t forget it. You’re a friend of Mr. Baker. Has he got any deals on?”

“I’m not that good a friend, Chief.”

“How about Marullo? Where is Marullo?”

“Went in to New York. He wants to get his arthritis checked over.”

“God almighty. I don’t know. I just don’t know. If there was just a line, why, I’d know where to jump.”

“You’re not talking sense, Stoney.”

“No, I’m not. I talked too much already.”

“I’m not too bright but if you want to unload—”

“I don’t. No, I don’t. They’re not going to pin a leak on me even if I knew who they were. Forget it, Eth. I’m just a worried man.”

“You couldn’t leak to me, Stoney. What was it—grand jury?”

“Then you do know?”

“A little.”

“What’s behind it?”

“Progress.”

Stoney came close to me and his iron hand grasped my upper arm so tightly that it hurt. “Ethan,” he said fiercely, “do you think I’m a good cop?”

“The best.”

“I aim to be. I want to be. Eth—do you think it’s right to make a man tell on his friends to save himself?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Neither do I. I can’t admire such a government. What scares me, Eth, is—I won’t be such a good cop any more because I won’t admire what I’m doing.”

“Did they catch you out, Chief?”

“It’s like you said. So many laws you can’t take a deep breath without you break one. But Jesus Christ! The guys were my friends. You won’t leak, Ethan?”

“No I won’t. You forgot your TV dinner, Chief.”

“Yeah!” he said. “I’ll go home and take off my shoes and watch how those television cops do it. You know, sometimes an empty house is a nice rest. See you, Eth.”

I liked Stoney. I guess he is a good officer. I wonder where the line falls.

I was closing up shop, drawing in the fruit bins from the doorway, when Joey Morphy sauntered in.

“Quick!” I said, and I closed the double front doors and drew the dark green shades. “Speak in a whisper.”

“What’s got into you?”

“Someone might want to buy something.”

“Yeah! I know what you mean. God! I hate long holidays. Brings out the worst in everybody. They start out mad and come home pooped and broke.”

“Want a cold drink while I draw the coverlets over my darlings?”

“I don’t mind. Got some cold beer?”

“To take out only.”

“I’ll take it out. Just open the can.”

I punched two triangular holes in the tin and he upended it, opened his throat, and drained it into him. “Ah!” he said and set the can on the counter.

“We’re going on a trip.”

“You poor devil. Where?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t fought over that yet.”

“Something’s going on. Do you know what it is?”

“Give me a clue.”

“I can’t. I just feel it. Hair on the back of my neck kind of itches. That’s a sure sign. Everybody’s a little out of synch.”

“Maybe you just imagine it.”

“Maybe. But Mr. Baker doesn’t take holidays. He was in one hell of a hurry to get out of town.”

I laughed. “Have you checked the books?”

“Know something? I did.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Once I knew a postmaster, little town. Had a punk kid working there, name of Ralph—pale hair, glasses, little tiny chin, adenoids big as goiters. Ralph got tagged for stealing stamps—lots of stamps, like maybe eighteen hundred dollars’ worth. Couldn’t do a thing. He was a punk.”

“You mean he didn’t take them?”

“If he didn’t it was just the same as if he did. I’m jumpy. I’m never going to get tagged if I can help it.”

“Is that why you never married?”

“Come to think of it, by God, that’s one of the reasons.”

I folded my apron and put it in the drawer under the cash register. “Takes too much time and effort to be suspicious, Joey. I couldn’t take the time.”

“Have to in a bank. You only lose once. All it needs is a whisper.”

“Don’t tell me you’re suspicious.”

“It’s an instinct. If anything’s just a little bit out of norm, my alarm goes off.”

“What a way to live! You don’t really mean that.”

“I guess I don’t. I just thought if you’d heard something, you’d tell me—that is, if it was any of my business.”

“I think I’d tell anybody anything I know. Maybe that’s why nobody ever tells me anything. Going home?”

“No, I think I’ll go eat across the street.”

I switched the front lights off. “Mind coming out through the alley? Look, I’ll make sandwiches in the morning before the rush. One ham, one cheese on rye bread, lettuce and mayonnaise, right? And a quart of milk.”

“You ought to work in a bank,” he said.

I guess he wasn’t any lonelier than anybody else just because he lived alone. He left me at the door of the Foremaster and for a moment I wished I could go with him. I thought home might be a mess.

And it was. Mary had planned the trip. Out near Montauk Point there’s a dude ranch[61] with all the fancy fixings you see in what they call adult Westerns. The joke is that it’s the oldest working cattle ranch in America. It was a cattle ranch before Texas was discovered. First charter came from Charles II. Originally the herds that supplied New York grazed there and the herdsmen were drawn by lot, like jurors, for limited service. Of course now it’s all silver spurs and cowboy stuff, but the red cattle still graze on the moors. Mary thought it would be nice to spend Sunday night in one of the guest houses.

Ellen wanted to go into New York, stay at a hotel, and spend two days in Times Square. Allen didn’t want to go at all, any place. That’s one of his ways of getting attention and proving that he exists.

The house boiled with emotion—Ellen in slow, dripping, juicy tears, Mary tired and flushed with frustration, Allen sitting sullen and withdrawn with his little radio blasting in his ear, a thumping whining song of love and loss in a voice of sub-hysteria. “You promised to be true, and then you took and threw, my lovin’ lonely heart right on the floor.”

“I’m about ready to give up,” Mary said.

“They’re just trying to help.”

“They seem to go out of their way to be difficult.”

“I never get to do anything.” Ellen sniffled.

In the living room Allen turned up the volume. “… my lovin’ lonely heart right on the floor.”

“Couldn’t we lock them in the cellar and go off by ourselves, carotene, dear.”

“You know, at this point I wish we could.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the pounding roar of the lovin’ lonely heart.

Without warning a rage came up in me. I turned and strode toward the living room to tear my son to shreds and throw his lonely lovin’ corpse on the floor and trample it. As I went loping through the door the music stopped. “We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin. Officials of New Baytown and Wessex County were this afternoon subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury to answer charges ranging from fixing traffic tickets to taking bribes and kickbacks on town and county contracts....”

There it came—the Town Manager, the council, the magistrates, the works. I listened without hearing—sad and heavy. Maybe they had been doing what they were charged with, but they’d been doing it so long they didn’t think it was wrong. And even if they were innocent they couldn’t be cleared before the local election, and even if a man is cleared the charge is remembered. They were surrounded. They must have known it. I listened for a mention of Stoney and it didn’t come so I guess he had traded them for immunity. No wonder he felt so raw and alone.

Mary was listening at the door. “Well!” she said. “We haven’t had so much excitement in a long time. Do you think it’s true, Ethan?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “That’s not what it’s for.”

“I wonder what Mr. Baker thinks.”

“He went on a holiday. Yes, I wonder what he feels.”

Allen grew restive because his music was interrupted.

The news and dinner and dishes put off our trip problems until it was too late for a decision or for further tears and quarreling.

In bed I got to shivering all over. The cold, passionless savagery of the attack chilled right through the warm summer night.

Mary said, “You’re all goose lumps, dear. Do you think you have a virus?”

“No, my fancy, I guess I was just feeling what those men must feel. They must feel awful.”

“Stop it, Ethan. You can’t take other people’s troubles on your shoulders.”

“I can because I do.”

“I wonder if you’ll ever be a businessman. You’re too sensitive, Ethan. It’s not your crime.”

“I was thinking maybe it is—everybody’s crime.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t much either, sweetheart.”

“If there was only someone who could stay with them.”

“Repeat, please, Columbine!”

“How I would love to take a holiday just with you. It’s been forever.”

“We’re short on unattached elderly female relatives. Put your mind to it. If only we could can them or salt or pickle them for a little while. Mary, madonna, put your mind to it. I ache to be alone with you in a strange place. We could walk the dunes and swim naked at night and I would tousle you in a fern bed.”

“Darling, I know, darling. I know it’s been hard on you. Don’t think I don’t know.”

“Well, hold me close. Let’s think of some way.”

“You’re still shivering. Do you feel cold?”

“Cold and hot, full and empty—and tired.”

“I’ll try to think of something. I really will. Of course I love them but—”

“I know, and I could wear my bow tie—”

“Will they put them in jail?”

“I wish we could—”

“Those men?”

“No. It won’t be necessary. They can’t even appear before next Tuesday, and Thursday is election. That’s what it’s for.”

“Ethan, that’s cynical. You aren’t like that. We’ll have to go away if you’re getting cynical because—that wasn’t a joke, the way you said it. I know your jokes. You meant that.”

A fear struck me. I was showing through. I couldn’t let myself show through. “Oh say, Miss Mousie, will you marry me?”

And Mary said, “Oho! Oho!”

My sudden fear that I might be showing through was very great. I had made myself believe that the eyes are not the mirror of the soul. Some of the deadliest little female contraptions I ever saw had the faces and the eyes of angels. There is a breed that can read through skin and through bone right into the center, but they are rare. For the most part people are not curious except about themselves. Once a Canadian girl of Scottish blood told me a story that had bitten her and the telling bit me. She said that in the age of growing up when she felt that all eyes were on her and not favorably, so that she went from blushes to tears and back again, her Highland grandfather, observing her pain, said sharply, “Ye wouldna be sae worrit[62] wi’ what folk think about ye if ye kenned how seldom they do.” It cured her and the telling reassured me of privacy, because it’s true. But Mary, who ordinarily lives in a house of flowers of her own growing, had heard a tone, or felt a cutting wind. This was a danger, until tomorrow should be over.

If my plan had leaped up full-grown and deadly I would have rejected it as nonsense. People don’t do such things, but people play secret games. Mine began with Joey’s rules for robbing a bank. Against the boredom of my job I played with it and everything along the way fell into it—Allen and his mouse mask, leaking toilet, rusty pistol, holiday coming up, Joey wadding paper in the lock of the alley door. As a game I timed the process, enacted it, tested it. But gunmen shooting it out with cops—aren’t they the little boys who practiced quick draws with cap pistols until they got so good they had to use the skill?

I don’t know when my game stopped being a game. Perhaps when I knew I might buy the store and would need money to run it. For one thing, it is hard to throw away a perfect structure without testing it. And as for the dishonesty, the crime—it was not a crime against men, only against money. No one would get hurt. Money is insured. The real crimes were against men, against Danny and against Marullo. If I could do what I had done, theft was nothing. And all of it was temporary. None of it would ever have to be repeated. Actually, before I knew it was not a game, my procedure and equipment and timing were as near perfection as possible. The cap-pistol boy found a .45 in his hand.

Of course an accident was possible but that is so in crossing the street or walking under a tree. I don’t think I had any fear. I had rehearsed that out of me, but I did have a breathlessness, like the stage fright of an actor standing in the wings on his opening night. And it was like a play in that every conceivable mischance had been inspected and eliminated.

In my worry that I would not sleep, I slept, deeply and as far as I know without dreams, and overslept. I had planned to use the dark pre-day for the calming medicine of contemplation. Instead, when my eyes jerked open, the tail of the cow in the lake had been visible at least half an hour. I awakened with a jar like the blow of driven air from high explosive. Sometimes such an awakening sprains muscles. Mine shook the bed so that Mary awakened, saying, “What’s the matter?”

“I’ve overslept.”

“Nonsense. It’s early.”

“No, my ablative absolute. This is a monster day for me. The world will be grocery-happy today. Don’t you get up.”

“You’ll need a good breakfast.”

“Know what I’ll do? I’ll get a carton of coffee at the Foremaster and I’ll raven Marullo’s shelves like a wolf.”

“You will?”

“Rest, little mouse of a mouseness, and try to find a way for us to escape from our darling children. We need that. I mean it.”

“I know we do. I’ll try to think.”

I was dressed and gone before she could suggest any of the seasonal things for my protection and comfort.

Joey was in the coffee shop and he patted the stool beside him.

“Can’t, Morph. I’m late. Annie, could you give me a quart of coffee in a carton?”

“It’ll have to be two pints, Eth.”

“Good. Even gooder.”

She filled and covered the little paper buckets and put them in a bag.

Joey finished and walked across with me.

“You’ll have to say mass without the bishop this morning.”

“Guess so. Say, how about that news?”

“I can’t take it in.”

“You remember I said I smelled something.”

“I thought about that when I heard it. You’ve got quite a nose.”

“It’s part of the trade. Baker can come back now. Wonder if he will.”

“Come back?”

“You get no smell there?”

I looked at him helplessly. “I’m missing something and I don’t even know what it is.”

“Jesus God.”

“You mean I should see something?”

“That’s what I mean. The law of the fang is not repealed.”

“Oh, Lord! There must be a whole world I miss. I was trying to remember whether it’s both lettuce and mayonnaise you like.”

“Both.” He stripped the cellophane cover from his pack of Camels and wadded it to push in the lock.

“Got to go,” I said. “We’ve got a special sale on tea. Send in a box top, you get a baby! Know any ladies?”

“I sure do, and that’s about the last prize they want. Don’t bother to bring them, I’ll come for the sandwiches.” He went in his door and there was no click of the spring lock. I did hope that Joey never discovered that he was the best teacher I had ever had. He not only informed, he demonstrated and, without knowing it, prepared a way for me.

Everyone who knew about such things, the experts, agreed that only money gets money. The best way is always the simplest. The shocking simplicity of the thing was its greatest strength. But I really believe it was only a detailed daydream until Marullo through none of his fault walked in his own darkness over a cliff. Once it seemed almost certain that I could get the store for my own, only then did the high-flown dreaming come down to earth. A good but ill-informed question might be: If I could get the store, why did I need money? Mr. Baker would understand, so would Joey—so, for that matter, would Marullo. The store without running capital was worse than no store at all. The Appian Way[63] of bankruptcy is lined with the graves of unprotected ventures. I have one grave there already. The silliest soldier would not throw his whole strength at a break-through without mortars or reserves or replacements, but many a borning business does just that. Mary’s money in marked bills bulged against my bottom in my hip pocket, but Marullo would take as much of that as he could get. Then the first of the month. The wholesale houses are not openhanded with credit for unproved organizations. Therefore I would still need money, and that money was waiting for me behind ticking steel doors. The process of getting it, designed as daydreams, stood up remarkably when inspected. That robbery was unlawful troubled me very little. Marullo was no problem. If he were not the victim he might have planned it himself. Danny was troubling, even though I could with perfect truth assume that he was finished anyway. Mr. Baker’s ineffectual attempt to do the same thing to Danny gave me more justification than most men need. But Danny remained a burning in my guts and I had to accept that as one accepts a wound in successful combat. I had to live with that, but maybe it would heal in time or be walled off with forgetfulness the way a shell fragment gets walled off with cartilage.

The immediate was the money, and that move was as carefully prepared and timed as an electric circuit.

The Morphy laws stood up well and I remembered them and had even added one. First law: Have no past record. Well, I had none. Number two: No accomplices or confidants. I certainly had none. Number three: No dames. Well, Margie Young-Hunt was the only person I knew who could be called a dame, and I was not about to drink champagne out of her slipper. Number four: Don’t splurge. Well, I wouldn’t. Gradually I would use it to pay bills to wholesalers. I had a place for it. In my Knight Templar’s hatbox there was a support of velvet-covered cardboard, the size and shape of my head. This was already lifted free and the edges coated with contact cement so it could be restored in an instant.

Recognition—a Mickey Mouse mask. No one would see anything else. An old cotton raincoat of Marullo’s—all tan cotton raincoats look alike—and a pair of those tear-off cellophane gloves that come on a roll. The mask had been cut several days ago and the box and cereal flushed down the toilet, as the mask and gloves would be. The old silvered Iver Johnson pistol was smoked with lampblack and in the toilet was a can of crankcase oil to throw it in for delivery to Chief Stoney at the first opportunity.

I had added my own final law: Don’t be a pig. Don’t take too much and avoid large bills. If somewhere about six to ten thousand in tens and twenties were available, that would be enough and easy to handle and to hide. A cardboard cakebox on the cold counter would be the swap bag and when next seen it would have a cake in it. I had tried that terrible reedy ventriloquism thing to change my voice and had given it up for silence and gestures. Everything in place and ready.

I was almost sorry Mr. Baker wasn’t here. There would be only Morph and Harry Robbit and Edith Alden. It was planned to the split second. At five minutes to nine I would place the broom in the entrance. I’d practiced over and over. Apron tucked up, scale weight on the toilet chain to keep it flushing. Anyone who came in would hear the water and draw his own conclusion. Coat, mask, cakebox, gun, gloves. Cross the alley on the stroke of nine, shove open the back door, put on mask, enter just after timeclock buzzes and Joey swings open the door. Motion the three to lie down, with the gun. They’d give no trouble. As Joey said, the money was insured, he wasn’t. Pick up the money, put it in cakebox, cross alley, flush gloves and mask down toilet, put gun in can of oil, coat off. Apron down, money in hatbox, cake in cakebox, pick up broom, and go on sweeping sidewalk, available and visible when the alarm came. The whole thing one minute and forty seconds, timed, checked, and rechecked. But carefully as I had planned and timed, I still felt a little breathless and I swept out the store prior to opening the two front doors. I wore yesterday’s apron so that new wrinkles would not be noticeable.

And would you believe it, time stood still as though a Joshua in a wing collar had shot the sun in its course. The minute hand of my father’s big watch had set its heels and resisted morning.

It was long since I had addressed my flock aloud, but this morning I did, perhaps out of nervousness.

“My friends,” I said, “what you are about to witness is a mystery. I know I can depend on you to keep silent. If any of you have any feeling about the moral issue involved, I challenge you and will ask you to leave.” I paused. “No objections? Very well. If I ever hear of an oyster or a cabbage discussing this with strangers, the sentence is death by dinner fork.

“And I want to thank you all. We have been together, humble workers in the vineyard, and I a servant as you are. But now a change is coming. I will be master here henceforth, but I promise I will be a good and kind and understanding master. The time approaches, my friends, the curtain rises—farewell.” And as I moved to the front doors with the broom, I heard my own voice cry, “Danny—Danny! Get out of my guts.” A great shudder shook me so that I had to lean on the broom a moment before I opened up the doors.

My father’s watch said nine with its black, stumpy hour hand and minus six with its long, thin minute hand. I could feel its heart beat against my palm as I looked at it.

Chapter fifteen

It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever. It is the law in many states, certainly in ours, that it must rain on long holiday weekends, else how could the multitudes get drenched and miserable? The July sun fought off a multitude of little feathered clouds and drove them scuttling, but thunderheads looked over the western rim, the strong-arm rain-bearers from the Hudson River Valley, armed with lightning and already mumbling to themselves. If the law was properly obeyed, they would hold back until a maximum number of ant-happy humans were on the highways and the beaches, summer-dressed and summer-green.

Most of the other stores did not open until nine-thirty. It had been Marullo’s thought to catch a pinch of trade by having me jump the gun half an hour. I thought I would change that. It caused more ill feeling among the other stores than the profit justified. Marullo didn’t care about that, if he ever knew about it. He was a foreigner, a wop, a criminal, a tyrant, a squeezer of the poor, a bastard, and eight kinds of son of a bitch. I having destroyed him, it was only natural that his faults and crimes should become blindingly apparent to me.

I felt old long hand edging around on my father’s watch and I found I was sweeping viciously with tensed muscles, waiting for the moment of swift, smooth movement of my mission. I breathed through my mouth, and my stomach pushed against my lungs as I remember it did waiting for an attack.

For Saturday-morning-Fourth-of-July-weekend, there were few people about. A stranger—old man—went by, carrying a fishing rod and a green plastic tackle box. He was on his way to the town pier to sit all day dangling a limp strip of squid in the water. He didn’t even look up, but I forced his attention.

“Hope you catch some big ones.”

“Never catch anything,” he said.

“Stripers come in sometimes.”

“I don’t believe it.”

A red-hot optimist, but at least I had set the hook in his attention.

And Jennie Single rolled along the sidewalk. She moved as though she had casters instead of feet, probably New Baytown’s least reliable witness. Once she turned on her gas oven and forgot to light it. She’d have blown herself through the roof if she could have remembered where she had put the matches.

“Morning, Miss Jenny.”

“Good morning, Danny.”

“I’m Ethan.”

“Course you are. I’m going to bake a cake.”

I tried to gouge a scar in her memory. “What kind?”

“Well, it’s Fannie Farmer but the label fell off the package so I really don’t know.”

What a witness she would make, if I needed a witness. And why did she say “Danny”?

A piece of tinfoil on the pavement resisted the broom. I had to stoop down and lift it with a fingernail. Those assistant bank mice were really mousing the hour with Cat Baker away. They were the ones I wanted. It was less than one minute to nine when they burst from the coffee shop and sprinted across the street.

“Run—run—run!” I called and they grinned self-consciously as they charged the bank doors.

Now it was time. I must not think of the whole thing—just one step at a time and each in its place, as I had practiced. I folded my anxious stomach down where it belonged. First lean the broom against the doorjamb where it could be seen. I moved with slow, deliberate speed.

From the corner of my eye I saw a car come along the street and I paused to let it go by.

“Mr. Hawley!”

I whirled the way cornered gangsters do in the movies. A dusty dark green Chevrolet had slid to the curb and, great God! that Ivy League government man was getting out. My stone-built earth shuddered like a reflection in water. Paralyzed, I saw him cross the pavement. It seemed to take ages, but it was simple as that. My long-planned perfect structure turned to dust before my eyes the way a long-buried artifact does when the air strikes it. I thought of rushing for the toilet and going through with it. It wouldn’t work. I couldn’t repeal the Morphy law. Thought and light must travel at about the same speed. It’s a shock to throw out a plan so long considered, so many times enacted that its consummation is just one more repetition, but I tossed it out, threw it away, closed it off. I had no choice. And light-speed thought said, Thank God he didn’t come one minute later. That would have been the fatal accident they write about in crime stories.

And all this while the young man moved stiffly four steps across the pavement.

Something must have showed through to him.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Hawley? You look sick.”

“Skitters,” I said.

“That’ll wait for no man. Run for it. I’ll wait.”

I dashed for the toilet, closed the door, and pulled the chain to make a rush of water. I hadn’t switched on the light. I sat there in the dark. My quaking stomach played along. In a moment I really had to go, and I did, and slowly the beating pressure in me subsided. I added a by-law to the Morphy code. In case of accident, change your plan—instantly.

It has happened to me before that in crisis or great danger I have stepped out and apart and as an interested stranger watched myself, my movements and my mind, but immune to the emotions of the thing observed. Sitting in the blackness, I saw the other person fold his perfect plan and put it in a box and close the lid and shove the thing not only out of sight but out of thought. I mean that by the time I stood up in the darkness and zipped and smoothed and laid my hand on the flimsy plywood door, I was a grocery clerk prepared for a busy day. It was no secretiveness. It was really so. I wondered what the young man wanted, but only with the pale apprehension that comes from a low-grade fear of cops.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” I said. “Can’t remember what I ate to cause that.”

“There’s a virus going around,” he said. “My wife had it last week.”

“Well, this virus carried a gun. I nearly got caught short. What can I do for you?”

He seemed embarrassed, apologetic, almost shy. “A guy does funny things,” he said.

I overcame an impulse to say, It takes all kinds—and I’m glad I did because his next words were, “In my business you meet all kinds.”

I walked behind the counter and kicked the leather Knight Templar hatbox closed. And I leaned my elbows on the counter.

Very odd. Five minutes earlier I saw myself through the eyes of other people. I had to. What they saw was important. And as he came across the pavement, this man had been a huge, dark, hopeless fate, an enemy, an ogre. But with my project tucked away and gone as a part of me, I saw him now as an object apart—no longer linked with me for good or bad. He was, I think, about my age, but shaped in a school, a manner, perhaps a cult—a lean face and hair carefully trimmed short and standing straight up, white shirt of a coarse woven linen with the collar buttoned down and a tie chosen by his wife, and without doubt patted and straightened by her as he left the house. His suit a gray darkness and his nails home cared for but well cared for, a wide gold wedding ring on his left hand, a tiny bar in his buttonhole, a suggestion of the decoration he would not wear. His mouth and dark blue eyes were schooled to firmness, which made it all the more strange that they were not firm now. In some way a hole had been opened in him. He was not the same man whose questions had been short, squared bars of steel spaced perfectly, one below its fellow.

“You were here before,” I said. “What is your business?”

“Department of Justice.”

“Your business is justice?”

He smiled. “Yes, at least that’s what I hope. But I’m not on official business—not even sure the department would approve. But it’s my day off.”

“What can I do for you?”

“It’s kind of complicated. Don’t know quite where to begin. It’s not in the book. Hawley, I’ve been in the service twelve years and I’ve never had anything like this before.”

“Maybe if you tell me what it is I can help you do it.”

He smiled at me. “Hard to set it up. I’ve been driving three hours from New York and I’ve got to drive three hours back in holiday traffic.”

“Sounds serious.”

“It is.”

“I think you said your name was Walder.”

“Richard Walder.”

“I’m going to be swamped with customers, Mr. Walder. Don’t know why they haven’t started. Hot-dog-and-relish trade. You’d better start. Am I in trouble?”

“In my job you meet all kinds. Tough ones, liars, cheats, hustlers, stupid, bright. Mostly you can get mad at them, get an attitude to carry you through. Do you see?”

“No, I guess not. Look, Walder, what in hell’s bothering you? I’m not completely stupid. I’ve talked to Mr. Baker at the bank. You’re after Mr. Marullo, my boss.”

“And I got him,” he said softly.

“What for?”

“Illegal entry. It’s not my doing. They throw me a dossier and I follow it up. I don’t judge him or try him.”

“He’ll be deported?”

“Yes.”

“Can he make a fight? Can I help him?”

“No. He doesn’t want to. He’s pleading guilty. He wants to go.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!”

Six or eight customers came in. “I warned you,” I called to him, and I helped them select what they needed or thought they did. Thank heaven I had ordered a mountain of hot-dog and hamburger rolls.

Walder called, “What do you get for piccalilli?”

“It’s marked on the label.”

“Thirty-nine cents, ma’am,” he said. And he went to work, measuring, bagging, adding. He reached in front of me to ring up cash on the register. When he moved away I took a bag from the pile, opened the drawer, and, using the bag like a potholder, I picked up the old revolver, took it back to the toilet, and dropped it in the can of crankcase oil that waited for it.

“You’re good at this,” I said when I came back.

“I used to have a job at Grand Union after school.”

“It shows.”

“Don’t you have anybody to help?”

“I’m going to bring my boy in.”

Customers always come in coveys, never in evenly spaced singles. A clerk gets set in the interval to meet the next flight. Another thing, when two men do something together they become alike, differences of mind become less ragged. The Army discovered that black and white no longer fight each other when they have something else to fight in company. My subcutaneous fear of a cop dissipated when Walder weighed out a pound of tomatoes and totted up a list of figures on a bag.

Our first flight took off.

“Better tell me quick what you want,” I said.

“I promised Marullo I’d come out here. He wants to give you the store.”

“You’re nuts. I beg your pardon, ma’am. I was speaking to my friend.”

“Oh, yes. Of course. Well, there are five of us—three children. How many frankfurters will I need?”

“Five apiece for the children, three for your husband, two for you. That’s twenty.”

“You think they’ll eat five?”

“They think they will. Is it a picnic?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then get five extra for dropping in the fire.”

“Where do you keep the Plug-O for sinks?”

“Back there with the cleansers and ammonia.”

It was broken up like that and was bound to be. Edited of customers, it was like this:

“I guess I’m in a state of shock. I just do my job and it’s with mugs for the most part. If you get conditioned by crooks and liars and cheats, why, an honest man can shock the hell out of you.”

“What do you mean, honest? My boss never gave away anything. He’s a tough monkey.”

“I know he is. We made him that way. He told me and I believe him. Before he came over he knew the words on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty. He’d memorized the Declaration of Independence in dialect. The Bill of Rights was words of fire. And then he couldn’t get in. So he came anyway. A nice man helped him—took everything he had and dropped him in the surf to wade ashore. It was quite a while before he understood the American way, but he learned—he learned. ‘A guy got to make a buck! Look out for number one!’ But he learned. He’s not dumb. He took care of number one.”

This was interspersed with customers so it didn’t build to a dramatic climax—just a series of short statements.

“That’s why he wasn’t hurt when somebody turned him in.”

“Turned him in?”

“Sure. All it takes is a telephone call.”

“Who did that?”

“Who knows? The department’s a machine. You set the dials and it follows through all the steps like an automatic washer.”

“Why didn’t he run for it?”

“He’s tired, right to his bones he’s tired. And he’s disgusted. He’s got some money. He wants to go back to Sicily.”

“I still don’t get it about the store.”

“He’s like me. I can take care of chiselers. That’s my job. An honest man gums up my works, throws me sky high. That’s what happened to him. One guy didn’t try to cheat him, didn’t steal, didn’t whine, didn’t chisel. He tried to teach the sucker to take care of himself in the land of the free but the boob couldn’t learn. For a long time you scared him. He tried to figure out your racket, and he discovered your racket was honesty.”

“Suppose he was wrong?”

“He doesn’t think he was. He wants to make you a kind of monument to something he believed in once. I’ve got the conveyance out in the car. All you have to do is file it.”

“I don’t understand it.”

“I don’t know whether I do or not. You know how he talks—like corn popping. I’m trying to translate what he tried to explain. It’s like a man is made a certain way with a certain direction. If he changes that, something blows, he strips a gear, he gets sick. It’s like a—well, like a do-it-yourself police court. You have to pay for a violation. You’re his down payment, kind of, so the light won’t go out.”

“Why did you drive out here?”

“Don’t know exactly. Had to—maybe—so the light won’t go out.”

“Oh, God!”

The store clouded up with clamoring kids and damp women. There wouldn’t be any more uncluttered moments until noon at least.

Walder went out to his car, and came back and parted a wave of frantic summer wives to get to the counter. He laid down one of those hard board bellows envelopes tied with a tape.

“Got to go. Four hours’ drive with this traffic. My wife’s mad. She said it could wait. But it couldn’t wait.”

“Mister, I been waiting ten minutes to get waited on.”

“Be right with you, ma’am.”

“I asked him if he had any message and he said, ‘Tell him good-by.’ You got any message?”

“Tell him good-by.”

The wave of ill-disguised stomachs closed in again and it was just as well for me. I dropped the envelope in the drawer below the cash register and with it—desolation.

Chapter sixteen

The day went quickly and yet was endless. Closing time had no relation to opening time, so long ago it was that I could hardly remember it. Joey came in as I was about to close the front doors and without asking him I punched a beer can and handed it to him, and then I opened one for myself and I have never done that before. I tried to tell him about Marullo and the store, and found I could not, not even the story I had accepted in exchange for the truth.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I guess I am. Look at those shelves—stripped. They bought things they didn’t want and didn’t need.” I unloaded the cash register into the gray canvas bag, added the money Mr. Baker had brought, and on top I put the bellows envelope and tied up the bag with a piece of string.

“You oughtn’t to leave that around.”

“Maybe not. I hide it. Want another beer?”

“Sure.”

“Me too.”

“You’re too good an audience,” he said. “I get to believing my own stories.”

“Like what?”

“Like my triple-deck instincts. I had one this morning. Woke up with it. Guess I dreamed it, but it was real strong, hair on the back of my neck and everything. I didn’t think the bank was going to get stuck up today. I knew it. I knew it, lying in bed. We keep little wedges under the foot alarms so we won’t tramp them by mistake. First thing this morning I took them out. I was that sure of it, braced for it. Now how do you explain that?”

“Maybe somebody planned it and you read his mind and he gave it up.”

“You make it easy for a guy to guess wrong with honor.”

“How do you figure it?”

“God knows. I think I’ve been Mr. Know-It-All to you so much I got to believe it. But it sure shook me up.”

“You know, Morph, I’m too tired even to sweep out.”

“Don’t leave that dough here tonight. Take it home.”

“Okay, if you say so.”

“I still got the feeling something’s screwy.”

I opened the leather box and put the money sack in with my plumed hat and strapped it closed. Joey, watching me, said, “I’m going in to New York and get a room at a hotel and I’m going to watch the waterfall across Times Square for two solid days with my shoes off.”

“With your date?”

“I called that off. I’ll order up a bottle of whisky and a dame. Don’t have to talk to either of them.”

“I told you—maybe we’re going on a little trip.”

“Hope so. You need it. Ready to go?”

“Couple of things to do. You go on, Joey. Get your shoes off.”

First thing to do was to call Mary and tell her I had to be a little late.

“Yes, but hurry, hurry, hurry. News, news, news.”

“Can’t you tell me now, sweetheart?”

“No. I want to see your face.”

I hung the Mickey Mouse mask on the cash register by its rubber band so that it covered the little window where the numbers show. Then I put on my coat and hat and turned out the lights and sat on the counter with my legs dangling. A naked black banana stalk nudged me on one side and the cash register fitted against my left shoulder like a bookend. The shades were up so that the summer late light strained through the crossed-wire grating, and it was very quiet, a quiet like a rushing sound, and that’s what I needed. I felt in my left side pocket for the lump the cash register pushed against me. The talisman—I held it in my two hands and stared down at it. I had thought I needed it yesterday. Had I forgot to put it back or was my keeping it with me no accident? I don’t know.

As always it put its power on me as I traced its design with my finger. At midday it was the pink of a rose, but in the evening it picked up a darker tone, a purplish blush as though a little blood had got in it.

It wasn’t thought I needed but rearrangement, change of design, as though I were in a garden from which the house had been moved in the night. Some kind of makeshift had to be set up to shelter me until I could rebuild. I had retired into busyness until I could let new things enter slowly and count and identify them as they came. The shelves, all day assaulted, showed many gaps where their defenses had been breeched by the hungry horde, a snaggle-toothed effect, a walled town after artillery fire.

“Let us pray for our departed friends,” I said. “The thin red line of catsup, the gallant pickles and condiments down to the small bald capers of vinegar. We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—no not that. It is rather to us the living—no not that. Alfio—I wish you luck and surcease from pain. You are wrong, of course, but wrongness can be a poultice to you. You made a sacrifice for having been a sacrifice.”

People passing in the street flickered the light inside the store. I dug back in the debris of the day for Walder’s words and for his face when he said them: “A do-it-yourself police court. You have to pay for a violation. You’re his down payment, kind of, so the light won’t go out.” That’s what the man said. Walder in his safe world of crooks shaken by one gleaming shaft of honesty.

So the light won’t go out. Did Alfio say it that way? Walder didn’t know, but he did know that’s what Marullo meant.

I traced the serpent on the talisman and came back to the beginning, which was the end. That was an old light—Marulli three thousand years ago found their way through the lupariae to the Lupercal on the Palatine[64] to offer a votive to Lycean Pan, protector of the flocks from wolves. And that light had not gone out. Marullo, the dago, the wop, the guinea, sacrificed to the same god for the same reason. I saw him again raise his head out of the welter of fat neck and aching shoulders, I saw the noble head, the hot eyes—and the light. I wondered what my payment would be and when demanded. If I took my talisman down to the Old Harbor and threw it in the sea—would that be acceptable?

I did not draw the shades. On long holidays we left them up so the cops could look in. The storeroom was dark. I locked the alley door and was halfway across the street when I remembered the hatbox behind the counter. I did not go back for it. It would be a kind of question asked. The wind was rising that Saturday evening, blowing shrill and eagerly from the southeast as it must to bring the rain to soak the vacationers. I thought to put out the milk for that gray cat on Tuesday and invite it in to be a guest in my store.

Chapter seventeen

I don’t know for sure how other people are inside—all different and all alike at the same time. I can only guess. But I do know how I will squirm and wriggle to avoid a hurtful truth and, when finally there is no choice, will put it off, hoping it will go away. Do other people say primly, “I’ll think about that tomorrow when I am rested,” and then draw on a hoped-for future or an edited past like a child playing with violence against the inevitability of bedtime?

My dawdled steps toward home led through a minefield of the truth. The future was sowed with fertile dragon’s teeth. It was not unnatural to run for a safe anchorage in the past. But on that course, set square across it was Aunt Deborah, a great wing shot on a covey of lies, her eyes gleaming question marks.

I had looked in the window of the jewelry store at expanding watch bands and glasses frames as long as was decent. The humid, windy evening was breeding a thunderstorm.

There were many like Great-Aunt Deborah early in the last century, islands of curiosity and knowledge. Maybe it was being cut off from a world of peers that drove the few into books or perhaps it was the endless waiting, sometimes three years, sometimes forever, for the ships to come home, that pushed them into the kind of books that filled our attic. She was the greatest of great-aunts, a sibyl and a pythoness in one, said magic nonsense words to me, which kept their magic but not their nonsense when I tracked them down.

“Me beswac fah wyrm thurh faegir word,” she said and the tone was doom. And, “Seo leo gif heo blades onbirigth abit aerest hire ladteow.”[65] Wonder-words they must be, since I still remember them.

The Town Manager of New Baytown went crab-scuttling by me, head down, and only gave me good evening in return for mine first offered.

I could feel my house, the old Hawley house, from half a block away. Last night it huddled in a web of gloom but this thunder-bordered eve it radiated excitement. A house, like an opal, takes on the colors of the day. Antic Mary heard my footsteps on the walk and she flickered out the screen door like a flame.

“You’ll never guess!” she said, and her hands were out, palms in, as though she carried a package.

It was in my mind so I replied “Seo leo gif heo blades onbirigth abit aerest hire ladteow.”

“Well, that’s a pretty good guess but it’s not right.”

“Some secret admirer has given us a dinosaur.”

“Wrong, but it’s just as wonderful. And I won’t tell till you wash up, because you’ll have to be clean to hear it.”

“What I hear is the love music of a blue-bottom baboon.” And I did—it blatted from the living room, where Allen importuned his soul in a phlegm of revolt. “Just when I was ready, to ask you to go steady, they said I didn’t know my mind. Your glance gives me ants whenever we romance, and they say I couldn’t know my mind.”

“I think I’ll burn him up, heaven wife.”

“No, you won’t. Not when you hear.”

“Can’t you tell me dirty?”

“No.”

I went through the living room. My son responded to my greeting with the sharp expression of a piece of chewed gum.

“I hope you got your lonely lovin’ heart swept up.”

“Huh?”

“Huh, sir! Last I heard, somebody had took and threw it on the floor.”

“Number one,” he said, “number one in the whole country. Sold a million copies in two weeks.”

“Great! I’m glad the future is in your hands.” I joined the next chorus as I went up the stairs. “ ‘Your glance gives me ants whenever we romance, and they say I couldn’t know my mind.’ ”

Ellen was stalking me with a book in her hand, one finger between the pages. I know her method. She would ask me what she thought I might think an interesting question and then let slip whatever it was Mary wanted to tell me. It’s a kind of triumph for Ellen to tell first. I wouldn’t say she is a tattletale, but she is. I waved crossed fingers at her.

“King’s X.”

“But, Daddy—”

“I said King’s X, Miss Hothouse Rhubarb, and I meant King’s X.” I slammed the door and shouted, “A man’s bathroom is his castle.” And I heard her laugh. I don’t trust children when they laugh at my jokes. I scrubbed my face raw and brushed my teeth until my gums bled. I shaved, put on a clean shirt and the bow tie my daughter hated, as a declaration of revolt.

My Mary was flittered with impatience when I faced her.

“You won’t believe it.”

“Seo leo gif heo blades onbirigth. Speak.”

“Margie is the nicest friend I ever had.”

“I quote—‘The man who invented the cuckoo clock is dead. This is old news but good!’ ”

“You’ll never guess—she’s going to keep the children so we can have our trip.”

“Is this a trick?”

“I didn’t ask. She offered.”

“They’ll eat her alive.”

“They’re crazy about her. She’s going to take them to New York on the train Sunday, stay all night in a friend’s apartment, and Monday see the new fifty-star flag-raising in Rockefeller Center and the parade and—everything.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Isn’t that the nicest thing?”

“The very nicest. And we will flee to the Montauk moors, Miss Mousie?”

“I’ve already called and reserved a room.”

“It’s delirium. I shall burst. I feel myself swelling up.”

I had thought to tell her about the store, but too much news is constipating. Better to wait and tell her on the moor.

Ellen came slithering into the kitchen. “Daddy, that pink thing’s gone from the cabinet.”

“I have it. I have it here in my pocket. Here, you may put it back.”

“You told us never to take it away.”

“I still tell you that, on pain of death.”

She snatched it almost greedily and carried it in both hands to the living room.

Mary’s eyes were on me strangely, somberly. “Why did you take it, Ethan?”

“For luck, my love. And it worked.”

Chapter eighteen

It rained on Sunday, July third, as it must, fat drops more wet than usual. We nudged our way in the damp segmented worms of traffic, feeling a little grand and helpless and lost, like cage-bred birds set free, and frightened as freedom shows its teeth. Mary sat straight, smelling of fresh-ironed cotton.

“Are you happy—are you gay?”

“I keep listening for the children.”

“I know. Aunt Deborah called it happy-lonesome. Take flight, my bird! Those long flaps on your shoulders are wings, you juggins.”

She smiled and nuzzled close. “It’s good, but I still listen for the children. I wonder what they are doing now?”

“Almost anything you can guess except wondering what we are doing.”

“I guess that’s right. They aren’t really interested.”

“Let us emulate them, then. When I saw your barge slide near, O Nile serpent,[66] I knew it was our day. Octavian will beg his bread tonight from some Greek goatherd.”

“You’re crazy. Allen never looks where he’s going. He might step right out in traffic against a light.”

“I know. And poor little Ellen with her club foot. Well, she has a good heart and a pretty face. Perhaps someone will love her and amputate her feet.”

“Oh! let me worry a little. I’ll feel better if I do.”

“I never heard it better put. Shall we together go over all the horrid possibilities?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. But you, highness, brought it to the family. It only travels in the female line. The little bleeders.”

“No one loves his children more than you.”

“My guilt is as the guilt of ten because I am a skunk.”

“I like you.”

“Now that’s the kind of worrying I approve of. See that stretch? Look how the gorse and heather hold and the sand cuts out from under like solid little waves. The rain hits the earth and jumps right up in a thin mist. I’ve always thought it is like Dartmoor or Exmoor, and I’ve never seen them except through the eyes of print. You know the first Devon men must have felt at home here. Do you think it’s haunted?”

“If it isn’t, you’ll haunt it.”

“You must not make compliments unless you mean them.”

“It’s not for now. Watch for the side road. It will say ‘Moorcroft. ’ ”

It did, too, and the nice thing about that lean spindle end of Long Island is that the rain sinks in and there is no mud.

We had a doll’s house to ourselves, fresh and ginghamy, and nationally advertised twin beds, fat as muffins.

“I don’t approve of those.”

“Silly—you can reach across.”

“I can do one whole hell of a lot better than that, you harlot.”

We dined in greasy dignity on broiled Maine lobsters sloshed down with white wine—lots of white wine to make my Mary’s eyes to shine, and I plied her with cognac seductively until my own head was buzzing. She remembered the number of our doll house and she could find the keyhole. I wasn’t too buzzed to have my way with her, but I think she could have escaped if she had wanted to.

Then, aching with comfort, she drowsed her head on my right arm and smiled and made small yawny sounds.

“Are you worried about something?”

“What a thought. You’re dreaming before you’re asleep.”

“You’re working so hard to make me happy. I can’t get past into you. Are you worried?”

A strange and seeing time, the front steps of sleep.

“Yes, I’m worried. Does that reassure you? I wouldn’t want you to repeat it, but the sky is falling and a piece of it fell on my tail.”

She had drifted sweetly off with her Panic smile. I slipped my arm free and stood between the beds. The rain was over except for roof drip, and the quarter-moon glistened its image in a billion droplets. “Beaux rêves,[67] my dearling dear. Don’t let the sky fall on us!”

My bed was cool and oversoft but I could see the sharp moon driving through the sea-fleeing clouds. And I heard the ghost-cry of a bittern. I crossed the fingers of both hands—King’s X for a little while. Double King’s X. It was only a pea that fell on my tail.

If the dawn came up with any thunder, I didn’t hear it. All golden green it was when I came to it, dark of heather and pale with fern and yellowy red with wet dune sand, and not far away the Atlantic glittering like hammered silver. A twisted gaffer oak beside our house had put out near its root a lichen big as a pillow, a ridge-waved thing of gray pearly white. A curving graveled path led among the small township of doll houses to the shingled bungalow that had spawned them all. Here were office, postcards, gifts, stamps, and also dining room with blue-checkered tablecloths where we dolls could dine.

The manager was in his counting house, checking some kind of list. I had noticed him when we registered, a man of wisped hair and little need to shave. He was a furtive and a furthy man at once, and he had so hoped from our gaiety our outing was clandestine that I nearly signed his book “John Smith and wife” to give him pleasure. He sniffed for sin. Indeed he seemed to see with his long tender nose as a mole does.

“Good morning,” I said.

He leveled his nose at me. “Slept well?”

“Perfectly. I wonder if I can carry a tray of breakfast to my wife.”

“We only serve in the dining room, seven-thirty to nine-thirty.”

“But if I carry it myself—”

“It’s against the rules.”

“Couldn’t we break them this once? You know how it is.” I threw that in because that’s how he hoped it was.

His pleasure was reward enough. His eyes grew moist and his nose trembled. “Feeling a little shy, is she?”

“Well, you know how it is.”

“I don’t know what the cook will say.”

“Ask him and tell him a dollar stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintop.”

The cook was a Greek who found a dollar attractive. In time I toted a giant napkin-covered tray along the graveled path and set it on a rustic bench while I picked a bouquet of microscopic field flowers to grace the royal breakfast of my dear.

Perhaps she was awake, but she opened her eyes anyway and said, “I smell coffee. Oh! Oh! What a nice husband—and—and flowers”—all the little sounds that never lose their fragrance.

We breakfasted and coffeed and coffeed again, my Mary propped up in bed, looking younger and more innocent than her daughter. And each of us spoke respectfully of how well we had slept.

My time had come. “Get comfortable. I have news both sad and glad.”

“Good! Did you buy the ocean?”

“Marullo is in trouble.”

“What?”

“A long time ago he came to America without asking leave.”

“Well—what?”

“Now they are asking him to leave.”

“Deported?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s awful.”

“It’s not nice.”

“What will we do? What will you do?”

“Playtime is over. He sold me the store—or rather he sold you the store. It’s your money. He has to convert his property and he likes me; he practically gave it to me—three thousand dollars.”

“But that’s awful. You mean—you mean you own the store?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not a clerk! Not a clerk!”

She rolled face down in the pillows and wept, big, full-bosomed sobs, the way a slave might when the collar is struck off.

I went out on the doll’s front stoop and sat in the sun until she was ready, and when she had finished and washed her face and combed her hair and put on her dressing gown, she opened the door and called to me. And she was different, would always be different. She didn’t have to say it. The set of her neck said it. She could hold up her head. We were gentlefolks again.

“Can’t we do anything to help Mr. Marullo?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“How did it happen? Who found out?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s a good man. They shouldn’t do it to him. How is he taking it?”

“With dignity. With honor.”

We walked on the beach as we had thought we might, sat in the sand, picked up small bright shells and showed them to each other, as we must do, spoke with conventional wonder about natural things, the sea, the air, the light, the wind-cooled sun, as though the Creator were listening in for compliments.

Mary’s attention was split. I think she wanted to be back home in her new status, to see the different look in the eyes of women, the changed tone of greetings in the High Street. I think she was no more “poor Mary Hawley, she works so hard.” She had become Mrs. Ethan Allen Hawley and would ever be. And I had to keep her that. She went through the day because it was planned and paid for, but the real shells she turned over and inspected were the shining days to come.

We had our lunch in the blue-checked dining room, where Mary’s manner, her certainty of position and place, disappointed Mr. Mole. His tender nose was out of joint that had so joyously quivered at the scent of sin. His disillusion was complete when he had to come to our table and report a telephone call for Mrs. Hawley.

“Who knows we’re here?”

“Why, Margie, of course. I had to tell her because of the children. Oh! I do hope— He doesn’t look where he’s going, you know.”

She came back trembling like a star. “You’ll never guess. You couldn’t.”

“I can guess it’s good.”

“She said, ‘Have you heard the news? Have you heard the radio?’ I could tell by her voice it wasn’t bad news.”

“Could you tell it and then flash back to how she said it?”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Could you let me try to believe it?”

“Allen has won honorable mention.”

“What? Allen? Tell me!”

“In the essay contest—in the whole country—honorable mention.”

“No!”

“He has. Only five honorable mentions—and a watch, and he’s going on television. Can you believe it? A celebrity in the family.”

“I can’t believe it. You mean all that slob stuff was a sham? What an actor! His lonely lovin’ heart wasn’t throwed on the floor at all.”

“Don’t make fun. Just think, our son is one of five boys in the whole United States to get honorable mention—and television.”

“And a watch! Wonder if he can tell time.”

“Ethan, if you make fun, people will think you’re jealous of your own son.”

“I’m just astonished. I thought his prose style was about the level of General Eisenhower’s. Allen doesn’t have a ghost-writer.”

“I know you, Eth. You make a game of running them down. But it’s you who spoil them. It’s just your secret way. I want to know—did you help him with his essay?”

“Help him! He didn’t even let me see it.”

“Well—that’s all right then. I didn’t want you looking smug because you wrote it for him.”

“I can’t get over it. It goes to show we don’t know much about our own children. How’s Ellen taking it?”

“Why, proud as a peacock. Margie was so excited she could hardly talk. The newspapers want to interview him—and television, he’s going to be on television. Do you realize we don’t even have a set to see him on? Margie says we can watch on hers. A celebrity in the family! Ethan, we ought to have a television.”

“We’ll get one. I’ll get one first thing tomorrow morning, or why don’t you order one?”

“Can we—Ethan, I forgot you own the store, I clean forgot. Can you take it in? A celebrity.”

“I hope we can live with him.”

“You let him have his day. We should start home. They’re coming in on the seven-eighteen. We should be there, you know, to kind of receive him.”

“And bake a cake.”

“I will.”

“And string crepe paper.”

“You aren’t being jealous mean, are you?”

“No. I’m overcome. I think crepe paper is a fine thing, all over the house.”

“But not outside. That would look—ostentatious. Margie said why don’t we pretend we don’t know and let him tell us?”

“I disagree. He might turn shy. It would be as though we didn’t care. No, he should come home to cheers and cries of triumph and a cake. If there was anything open, I’d get sparklers.”

“The roadside stands—”

“Of course. On the way home—if they have any left.”

Mary put down her head a moment as though she were saying grace. “You own the store and Allen’s a celebrity. Who would have thought all that could happen all at once? Ethan, we should get started home. We ought to be there when they come. Why are you looking that way?”

“It just swept over me like a wave—how little we know about anyone. It gives me a shiver of mullygrubs. I remember at Christmas when I should be gay I used to get the Welsh rats.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the way I heard it when Great-Aunt Deborah pronounced Weltschmerz.”[68]

“What’s that?”

“A goose walking over your grave.”

“Oh! That! Well, don’t get it. I guess this is the best day of our whole lives. It would be—ungrateful if we didn’t know it. Now you smile and chase off those Welsh rats. That’s funny, Ethan, ‘Welsh rats.’ You pay the bill. I’ll put our things together.”

I paid our bill with money that had been folded in a tight little square. And I asked Mr. Mole, “Do you have any sparklers left at the gift counter?”

“I think so. I’ll see.... Here they are. How many do you want?”

“All you have,” I said. “Our son has become a celebrity.”

“Really? What kind?”

“There’s only one kind.”

“You mean like Dick Clark or like that?”

“Or Chessman or Dillinger.”[69]

“You’re joking.”

“He’ll be on television.”

“What station? What time?”

“I don’t know—yet.”

“I’ll watch for it. What’s his name?”

“The same as mine. Ethan Allen Hawley—called Allen.”

“Well it’s been an honor to have you and Mrs. Allen with us.”

“Mrs. Hawley.”

“Of course. I hope you’ll come again. Lots of celebrities have stayed here. They come for—the quiet.”

Mary sat straight and proud on the golden road toward home in the slow and glittering snake of the traffic.

“I got a whole box of sparklers. Over a hundred.”

“Now that’s more like you, dear. I wonder if the Bakers are back yet.”

Chapter nineteen

My son conducted himself well. He was relaxed and kind to us. He took no revenge, ordered no executions. His honors and our compliments he accepted as his due, without vanity and also without overdone humility. He advanced to his chair in the living room and switched on his radio before the hundred sparklers had fizzed out to black sticks. It was obvious that he forgave us our trespasses. I never saw a boy accept greatness with more grace.

It was truly a night of wonders. If Allen’s easy ascent into heaven was surprising, how much more so was Ellen’s reaction. Some years of close and enforced observation told me Miss Ellen would be tattered and storm-blown with envy, would in fact look out for some means of minimizing his greatness. She fooled me. She became her brother’s celebrator. It was Ellen who told how they were sitting in an elegant apartment on Sixty-seventh Street, after an evening of magic, casually watching the C.B.S. late news on television, when the word of Allen’s triumph was announced. It was Ellen who recounted what they said and how they looked and how you could have knocked them over with a feather. Allen sat remote and calm during Ellen’s telling of how he would appear with the four other honorables, how he would read his essay while millions looked and listened, and Mary clucked happily in the pauses. I glanced at Margie Young-Hunt. She was indrawn as she was during card-reading. And a dark quiet crept into the room.

“No escaping it,” I said. “This calls for ice-cold root beer all around.”

“Ellen will get it. Where is Ellen? She drifts in and out like smoke.”

Margie Young-Hunt stood up nervously. “This is a family party. I’ve got to go.”

“But Margie, you’re part of it. Where did Ellen go?”

“Mary, don’t make me admit I’m a trifle on the pooped side.”

“You have had it, dear. I keep forgetting. We had such a rest, you’ll never know—and thanks to you.”

“I loved it. I wouldn’t have missed it.”

She wanted to be away, and quickly. She took our thanks and Allen’s thanks and fled.

Mary said quietly, “We didn’t tell about the store.”

“Let it ride. It would be robbing His Pink Eminence. It’s his right. Where did Ellen go?”

“She went to bed,” said Mary. “That’s thoughtful, darling, and you’re right. Allen, it’s been a big day. Time you went to bed.”

“I think I’ll sit here a while,” Allen said kindly.

“But you need rest.”

“I’m resting.”

Mary looked to me for help.

“These are the times that try men’s souls. I can dust him, or we can let him have his victory even over us.”

“He’s just a little boy, really. He needs his rest.”

“He needs several things, but rest isn’t one of them.”

“Everyone knows children need their rest.”

“The things everyone knows are most likely to be wrong. Did you ever know a child to die of overwork? No—only adults. Children are too smart for that. They rest when they need rest.”

“But it’s after midnight.”

“So it is, darling, and he will sleep until noon tomorrow. You and I will be up at six.”

“You mean you’ll go to bed and leave him sitting there?”

“He needs his revenge on us for having borne him.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What revenge?”

“I want to make a treaty with you because you’re growing angry.”

“So I am. You’re being stupid.”

“If within half an hour after we go to bed he does not creep to his nest, I will pay you forty-seven million, eight hundred and twenty-six dollars and eighty cents.”

Well, I lost, and I must pay her. It was thirty-five minutes after we said good night that the stair creaked under our celebrity.

“I hate you when you’re right,” my Mary said. She had prepared herself to spend the night listening.

“I wasn’t right, dear. I lost by five minutes. It’s just that I remember.”

She went to sleep then. She didn’t hear Ellen creep down the stairs, but I did. I was watching my red dots moving in the dark. And I did not follow, for I heard the faint click of the brass key in the lock of the cabinet and I knew my daughter was charging her battery.

My red spots were active. They dashed about and ran away when I centered on them. Old Cap’n was avoiding me. He hadn’t come clear since—well, since Easter. It’s not like Aunt Harriet—“up in heben she be”[70]—but I do know that when I am not friends with myself old Cap’n doesn’t come clear. That’s a kind of test of my personal relations with myself.

This night I forced him. I lay straight and rigid, far over on my side of the bed. I tightened every muscle of my body, particularly my neck and jaw, and doubled my fists on my belly and I forced him, bleak little eyes, white spiky mustache, and the forward-curving shoulders that proved he had once been a powerful man of his body and had used it. I even made him put on the blue cap with the short shiny visor and the gold H contrived of two anchors, the cap he hardly ever wore. The old boy was reluctant, but I made him come and I set him on the crumbling sea wall of Old Harbor near the Place. I sat him firmly on a heap of ballast stone and fixed his cupped hands on the head of the narwhal cane. That cane could have knocked over an elephant.

“I need something to hate. Being sorry and understanding—that’s pap. I’m looking for a real hate to take the heat off.”

Memory’s a spawner. Start with one clear detailed print, and it springs into action and it can go forward or back like a film, once it starts.

Old Cap’n moved. He pointed with his cane. “Line the third rock beyond the breakwater with the tip of Porty Point at high water, then out that line half a cable-length she lies, what’s left of her.”

“How far is half a cable-length, sir?”

“How far? Why, half a hundred fathom, of course. She was anchored to swing and the tide flowing. Two bad-luck years. Half the oil casks empty. I was ashore when she caught fire, about midnight. When the oil fired she lit the town like midday and flames running on the oil slick as far as Osprey Point. Couldn’t beach her for fear of burning the docks. She burned to the water in an hour. Her keel and false keel are down there now—and sound. Shelter Island virgin oak they were, and her knees too.”

“How’d it start?”

“I never thought it started. I was ashore.”

“Who’d want to burn her?”

“Why, her owners.”

“You owned her.”

“I was half-owner. I couldn’t burn a ship. I’d like to see those timbers—like to see what shape they’re in.”

“You can go now, Cap’n, sir.”

“That’s slim fare to hate on.”

“It’s better than nothing. I’ll get that keel up—soon as I’m rich. I’ll do that for you—line the third rock with Porty Point at high water, fifty fathoms out.” I was not sleeping. My fists and forearms were rigid and pressed against my stomach to prevent old Cap’n from fading, but when I let him go, sleep lapped over me.

When Pharaoh had a dream he called in the experts and they told him how it was and would be in the kingdom, and that was right because he was the kingdom. When some of us have a dream, we take it to an expert and he tells us how it is in the country of ourselves. I had a dream that didn’t need an expert. Like most modern people, I don’t believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.

In the springtime Allen, feeling low and lonely, announced that he was an atheist to punish God and his parents. I told him not to go out on a limb or he wouldn’t have leeway to not walk under ladders and cancel black cats with spit and thumb and wish on the new moon.

People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don’t dream at all. I can explain my dream easily enough, but that doesn’t make it any less frightening.

An order came through from Danny, I don’t know how. He was going away by aircraft and he wanted certain things of me, things I had to make myself. He wanted a cap for Mary. It had to be of dark brown sueded lambskin with the wool on the inside. It had to be of skin like an old pair of sheep-lined slippers I have, had to be like a baseball cap with a long beak. Also he wanted a wind gauge—not the little whirling metal cups but handmade from the thin, stiff cardboard of government postcards, mounted on strips of bamboo. And he called me to meet him before he took off. I carried old Cap’n’s narwhal stick with me. It stands in the elephant’s-foot umbrella stand in our hall.

When we got the elephant’s foot as a present I looked at the big ivory-colored toenails. I told my children, “The first kid who puts nail polish on those toenails gets clobbered—understand?” They obeyed me, so I had to paint them myself—bright red fingernail enamel from Mary’s harem table.

I went to meet Danny in Marullo’s Pontiac and the airport was the New Baytown post office. When I parked I laid the twisted stick on the back seat and two mean-looking cops in a squad car drove up and said, “Not on the seat.”

“Is it against the law?”

“So you want to be a wise guy!”

“No. I was just asking.”

“Well, don’t put it on the seat.”

Danny was in the back of the post office, sorting packages. He was wearing the lambskin cap and whirling the cardboard wind gauge. His face was thin and his lips very chapped but his hands were swollen like hot-water bottles, as though they had been wasp-stung.

He stood up to shake hands and my right hand was folded in the warm, rubbery mass. He put something in my hand, something small and heavy and cool, about the size of a key but not a key—a shape, a metal thing that felt sharp-edged and polished. I don’t know what it was because I didn’t look at it, I only felt it. I leaned near and kissed him on the mouth and with my lips felt his dry lips all chapped and rough. I awakened then, shaken and cold. The dawn had come. I could see the lake but not the cow standing in it, and I could still feel the chapped dry lips. I got up instantly because I didn’t want to lie there thinking about it. I didn’t make coffee but I went to the elephant’s foot and saw that the wicked club called a cane was still there.

It was the throbbing time of dawn, and hot and humid, for the morning wind had not started to blow. The street was gray and silver and the sidewalk greasy with the deposit of humanity. The Foremaster coffee shop wasn’t open, but I didn’t want coffee anyway. I went through the alley and opened my back door—looked in the front and saw the leather hatbox behind the counter. I opened a coffee can, poured the coffee in the garbage pail. Then I punched two holes in a can of condensed milk and squirted it into the coffee can, propped the back door open, and put the can in the entrance. The cat was in the alley all right, but he wouldn’t come to the milk until I went into the front of the store. From there I could see him, gray cat in gray alley, lapping the milk. When he raised his head he was mustached with milk. He sat down and wiped his mouth and licked his pads.

I opened the hatbox and took out the Saturday receipts, all listed and held together with paper clips. From the brown bank envelope I removed thirty one-hundred-dollar bills and replaced the other twenty of them. This three thousand dollars would be my margin of safety until the store’s economy could balance. Mary’s other two thousand would go back to her account and, as soon as I could do it safely, I would replace the three thousand. The thirty bills I put in my new wallet, which made it very fat in my hip pocket. Then I brought cases and cartons from the storeroom, ripped and tore them open, and began to replenish my exhausted shelves, while on a strip of wrapping paper I listed the goods that had to be reordered. Cartons and boxes I piled in the alley for the collection truck, and I refilled the coffeecan with milk but the cat did not return. Either he had had enough or he took pleasure only in what he could steal.

It must be that there are years unlike other years, as different in climate and direction and mood as one day can be from another day. This year of 1960 was a year of change, a year when secret fears come into the open, when discontent stops being dormant and changes gradually to anger. It wasn’t only in me or in New Baytown. Presidential nominations[71] would be coming up soon and in the air the discontent was changing to anger and the excitement anger brings. And it wasn’t only the nation; the whole world stirred with restlessness and uneasiness as discontent moved to anger and anger tried to find an outlet in action, any action so long as it was violent—Africa, Cuba, South America, Europe, Asia, the Near East, all restless as horses at the barrier.

I knew that Tuesday, July fifth, was going to be a day larger than other days. I even think I knew what things would happen before they happened, but since they did I will never be sure whether I really knew.

I think I knew that the seventeen-jewel, shockproof Mr. Baker, who ticked the hours, would come rattling at my front door an hour before the bank opening time. He did before I had opened for business. I let him in and closed the doors after him.

“What an awful thing,” he said. “I was out of touch. I came back as soon as I heard.”

“Which awful thing, sir?”

“Why, the scandal! Those men are my friends, my old friends. I’ve got to do something.”

“They won’t even be questioned before election—just charged.”

“I know. Couldn’t we issue a statement of our belief in their innocence? Even a paid advertisement if necessary.”

“In what, sir? The Bay Harbor Messenger doesn’t come out until Thursday.”

“Well, something should be done.”

“I know.”

It was so formal. He must have known I knew. And yet he met my eyes and he seemed genuinely worried.

“The crazy fringe will ruin town elections unless we do something. We’ve got to offer new candidates. We don’t have any choice. It’s a terrible thing to do to old friends, but they’d be the first to know we can’t let the egghead fringe get in.”

“Why don’t you talk to them?”

“They’re bruised and mad. They haven’t had time to think it out. Did Marullo come?”

“He sent a friend. I bought the store for three thousand.”

“That’s good. You got a bargain. Get the papers?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if he jumps, the bills are listed.”

“He won’t jump. He wants to go. He’s tired.”

“I never trusted him. Never knew what he had his fingers in.”

“Was he a crook, sir?”

“He was tricky, played both sides of the street. He’s worth a lot if he can dispose of his property, but three thousand—that’s a giveaway.”

“He liked me.”

“He must have. Who did he send, the Mafia?”

“A government man. You see, Marullo trusted me.”

Mr. Baker clasped his brow, and that was out of character. “Why didn’t I think of it? You’re the man. Good family, reliable, property-owner, businessman, respected. You don’t have an enemy in town. Of course you’re the man.”

“The man?”

“For Town Manager.”

“I’ve only been a businessman since Saturday.”

“You know what I mean. Around you we could get respectable new faces. Why, it’s the perfect way.”

“From grocery clerk to Town Manager?”

“Nobody ever thought of a Hawley as a grocery clerk.”

“I did. Mary did.”

“But you aren’t. We can announce it today before that crazy fringe gets set.”

“I’ll have to consider it from keelson to skys’l.”[72]

“There’s no time.”

“Who had you thought of before?”

“Before what?”

“Before the council burned. I’ll talk to you later. Saturday was a big day. I could have sold the scales.”

“You can make a nice thing of this store, Ethan. I advise you to build it up and sell it. You’re going to be too big to wait on customers. Is there any word at all about Danny?”

“Not yet. Not so far.”

“You shouldn’t have given him money.”

“Perhaps not. I thought I was doing a good deed.”

“Of course you did. Of course you did.”

“Mr. Baker, sir—what happened to the Belle-Adair?”

“What happened? Why, she burned.”

“In the harbor—how did it start, sir?”

“Funny time to ask. I only know what I heard. I was too little even to remember. Those old ships got oil-soaked. I suppose some sailor dropped a match. Your grandfather was master. I think he was ashore. Just came in.”

“Bad voyage.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Any trouble collecting the insurance?”

“Well, they always send investigators. No, as I remember, it took some time but we collected, Hawleys and Bakers.”

“My grandfather thought she was set afire.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“To get the money. The whaling industry was gone.”

“I never heard that he said that.”

“You never heard it?”

“Ethan—what are you getting at? Why are you bringing up something that happened so long ago?”

“It’s a horrible thing to burn a ship. It’s a murder. I’m going to bring up her keel someday.”

“Her keel?”

“I know just where she lies. Half a cable offshore.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I’d like to see if the oak is sound. It was Shelter Island virgin oak. She’s not all dead if her keel’s alive. You’d better go, if you’re going to bless the opening of the safe. And I’ve got to open up.”

Then his balance wheel started and he ticked off to the bank.

I think now I had expected Biggers too. Poor fellow must spend most of his time watching doorways. And he must have been waiting somewhere in peeking range for Mr. Baker to leave.

“I hope you’re not going to jump down my throat.”

“Why should I?”

“I can understand why you were huffy. I guess I wasn’t very—diplomatic.”

“Maybe that was it.”

“Have you chewed on my proposition?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think?”

“I think six per cent would be better.”

“I don’t know whether B.B. will go for it.”

“It’s up to them.”

“They might go five and a half.”

“And you might go the other half.”

“Jesus, man. I thought you were being a country boy. You cut deep.”

“Take it or leave it.”

“Well, what kind of volume would it be?”

“There’s a partial list over by the cash register.”

He studied the strip of wrapping paper. “Looks like I’m hooked. And, brother, I’m bleeding. Can I get the full order today?”

“Tomorrow would be better and bigger.”

“You mean you’ll switch the whole account?”

“If you play nice.”

“Brother, you must have your boss by the throat. Can you get away with it?”

“Just have to see.”

“Well, maybe I could get a crack at the drummer’s friend. Brother, you must be cold as a herring. I tell you that dame’s a dish.”

“Friend of my wife.”

“Oh! Yeah! I see how it could be. Too close to home is bad news. You’re smart. If I didn’t know it before, I know it now. Six per cent. Jesus! Tomorrow in the morning.”

“Maybe late this afternoon if I get time.”

“Make it tomorrow morning.”

On Saturday business came in bursts. This Tuesday the whole tempo had changed. People took time. They wanted to talk about the scandal, saying it was bad, awful, sad, disgraceful, but enjoying it too. We haven’t had a scandal for a long time. Nobody mentioned the Democratic National Convention coming up in Los Angeles—not even once. Of course New Baytown is a Republican town, but I think mostly they were interested in what was close to home. We knew the men whose graves we danced on.

Chief Stonewall Jackson came in during the noon hour and he looked tired and sad.

I put the can of oil on the counter and fished out the old pistol with a piece of wire.

“Here’s the evidence, Chief. Take it away, will you? It makes me nervous.”

“Well, wipe it off, will you? Look at that! That’s what they used to call a two-dollar pistol—top-latch Iver Johnson. You got anybody that can mind the store?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Where’s Marullo?”

“He’s out of town.”

“Guess maybe you might have to close up for a while.”

“What is this, Chief?”

“Well, Charley Pryor’s boy ran away from home this morning. Got a cold drink there somewhere?”

“Sure. Orange, cream, lemon, Coke?”

“Give me a Seven-Up. Charley’s a funny kind of guy. His boy Tom is eight. He figures the world’s against him and he’s going to run away to be a pirate. Anybody else would of give him a crack acrost the behind, but not Charley. Aren’t you going to open this?”

“Sorry. There you are. What’s Charley got to do with me? I like him, of course.”

“Well, Charley don’t do things like other people. He figures the best way to cure Tom is to help him. So after breakfast they get a bedroll together and a big lunch. Tom wants to take a Jap sword for self-protection, but it drags so he settles for a bayonet. Charley loads him in the car and drives him out of town to give him a good start. He let him out over near Taylor Meadow—you know, the old Taylor place. That’s about nine o’clock this morning. Charley watched the kid a while. First thing he did was sit down and eat six sandwiches and two hard-boiled eggs. And then he went on acrost the meadow with his brave little bindle and his bayonet and Charley drove home.”

Here it came. I knew it, I knew it. It was almost a relief to get it over.

“ ’Bout eleven he come slobbering out on the road and hooked a ride home.”

“I think I can guess, Stoney—is it Danny?”

“’Fraid so. Down in the cellar hole of the old house. Case of whisky, only two empties, and a bottle of sleeping pills. Sorry I got to ask you this, Eth. Been there a long time and something got at him, at his face. Cats, maybe. You remember any scars or marks on him?”

“I don’t want to look at him, Chief.”

“Well, who does? How about scars?”

“I remember a barb-wire cut above the knee on his left leg, and—and”—I rolled up my sleeve—“a heart just like this[73] tattooed. We did it together when we were kids. Cut in with a razor blade and rubbed ink in. It’s still pretty clear, see?”

“Well—that may do it. Anything else?”

“Yes—big scar under his left arm, piece of the rib cut out. He had pleural pneumonia before the new drugs and they put in a drain.”

“Well, of course if there was a rib cut, that’ll do it. I won’t even have to go back myself. Let the coroner get off his ass. You’ll have to swear to those marks if it’s him.”

“Okay. But don’t make me look at him, Stoney. He was—you know—he was my friend.”

“Sure, Eth. Say is there anything in what I hear about you running for Town Manager?”

“It’s news to me. Chief—could you stay here two minutes—”

“I got to go.”

“Just two minutes while I run across the street and get a drink?”

“Oh! Sure! I get it. Sure—go ahead. I got to get along with the new Town Manager.”

I got the drink and a pint too to bring back with me. When Stoney had gone, I printed BACK AT TWO on a card, closed the doors, and drew the shades.

I sat on the leather hatbox behind the counter in my store, sat in the dim green darkness of my store.

Chapter twenty

At ten minutes to three I went out the back door and around the corner to the front of the bank. Morph in his bronze cage drew in the sheaf of money and checks, the brown envelope, and the deposit slips. He spread the little bank books with a Y of fingers and wrote small angled numbers with a steel pen that whispered on the paper. As he pushed the books out to me he looked up with veiled and cautious eyes.

“I’m not going to talk about it, Ethan. I know he was your friend.”

“Thanks.”

“If you slip out quick you might avoid the Brain.”

But I didn’t. For all I know Morph may have buzzed him. The frosted-glass door of the office swung open and Mr. Baker, neat and spare and gray, said quietly, “Can you spare a moment, Ethan?”

No use to put it off. I walked into his frosty den and he closed the door so softly that I did not hear the latch click. His desk was topped with plate glass, under which were lists of typed numbers. Two customers’ chairs in echelon stood by his tall chair like twin suckling calves. They were comfortable but lower than the desk chair. When I sat down I had to look up at Mr. Baker and that put me in the position of supplication.

“Sad thing.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you ought to take all the blame. Probably would have happened anyway.”

“Probably.”

“I’m sure you thought you were doing the right thing.”

“I thought he had a chance.”

“Of course you did.”

My hatred was rising in my throat like a yellow taste, more sickening than furious.

“Apart from the human tragedy and waste, it raises a difficulty. Do you know whether he had relatives?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Anybody with money has relatives.”

“He had no money.”

“He had Taylor Meadow, free and clear.”

“Did he? Well, a meadow and a cellar hole—”

“Ethan, I told you we planned an airfield to service the whole district. The meadow is level. If we can’t use it, it will cost millions to bulldoze runways in the hills. And now, even if he has no heirs, it will have to go through the courts. Take months.”

“I see.”

His ire fissured. “I wonder if you do see! With your good intentions you’ve thrown the thing sky high. Sometimes I think a do-gooder is the most dangerous thing in the world.”

“Perhaps you’re right. I ought to get back to the store.”

“It’s your store.”

“It is, isn’t it? I can’t get used to it. I forget.”

“Yes, you forget. The money you gave him was Mary’s money. She’ll never see it now. You threw it away.”

“Danny was fond of my Mary. He knew it was her money.”

“Fat lot of good that will do her.”

“I thought he was making a joke. He gave me these.” I pulled the two pieces of ruled paper from my inside pocket, where I had put them, knowing I would have to draw them out like this.

Mr. Baker straightened them on his glass-topped desk. As he read them a muscle beside his right ear twitched so that his ear bobbed. His eyes went back over them, this time looking for a hole.

When the son of a bitch looked at me there was fear in him. He saw someone he hadn’t known existed. It took him a moment to adjust to the stranger, but he was good. He adjusted.

“What is your asking price?”

“Fifty-one per cent.”

“Of what?”

“Of the corporation or partnership or whatever.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You want an airfield. I have the only one available.”

He wiped his glasses carefully on a piece of pocket Kleenex, then put them on. But he didn’t look at me. He looked a circle all around me and left me out. Finally he asked, “Did you know what you were doing, Ethan?”

“Yes.”

“Do you feel good about it?”

“I guess I feel as the man felt who took him a bottle of whisky and tried to get him to sign a paper.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Yes.”

“He was a liar.”

“He told me he was. He warned me he was. Maybe there’s some trick in these papers.” I swept them gently from in front of him and folded the two soiled pencil-written sheets.

“There’s a trick all right, Ethan. Those documents are without a flaw, dated, witnessed, clear. Maybe he hated you. Maybe his trick was the disintegration of a man.”

“Mr. Baker, no one in my family ever burned a ship.”

“We’ll talk, Ethan, we’ll do business. We’ll make money. A little town will spring up on the hills around the meadow. I guess you’ll have to be Town Manager now.”

“I can’t, sir. That would constitute a conflict of interest. Some pretty sad men are finding that out right now.”

He sighed—a cautious sigh as though he feared to awaken something in his throat.

I stood up and rested my hand on the curved and padded leather back of the supplicant’s chair. “You’ll feel better, sir, when you have got used to the fact that I am not a pleasant fool.”

“Why couldn’t you have taken me into your confidence?”

“An accomplice is dangerous.”

“Then you do feel you have committed a crime.”

“No. A crime is something someone else commits. I’ve got to open the store, even if it is my own store.”

My hand was on the doorknob when he asked quietly, “Who turned Marullo in?”

“I think you did, sir.” He leaped to his feet, but I closed the door after me and went back to my store.

Chapter twenty-one

No one in the world can rise to a party or a plateau of celebration like my Mary. It isn’t what she contributes but what she receives that makes her glow like a jewel. Her eyes shine, her smiling mouth underlines, her quick laughter builds strength into a sickly joke. With Mary in the doorway of a party everyone feels more attractive and clever than he was, and so he actually becomes. Beyond this Mary does not and need not contribute.

The whole Hawley house glowed with celebration when I came home. Bright-colored plastic flags were strung in canopies from center light to picture molding, and lines of colored plastic bannerets hung from the banisters.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” Mary cried. “Ellen got them from the Esso Service Station. George Sandow loaned them.”

“What’s it about?”

“About everything. It’s a glory thing.”

I don’t know whether she had heard of Danny Taylor or had heard and retired him. Certainly I didn’t invite him to the feast, but he paced about outside. I knew I would have to go out to meet him later but I did not ask him in.

“You’d think it was Ellen had won honorable mention,” Mary said. “She’s even prouder than if she was the celebrity. Look at the cake she baked.” It was a tall white cake with HERO written on its top in red, green, yellow, and blue letters. “We’re having roast chicken and dressing and giblet gravy and mashed potatoes, even if it is summer.”

“Good, darling, good. And where’s the young celebrity?”

“Well, it’s changed him too. He’s taking a bath and changing for dinner.”

“It’s a day of portent, sibyl. Somewhere you will find a mule has foaled and a new comet come into the sky. A bath before dinner. Imagine!”

“I thought you might like to change too. I have a bottle of wine and I thought maybe a speech or a toast or something like that, even if it’s just the family.” She fairly flooded the house with party. I found myself rushing up the stairs to bathe and be a part of it.

Passing Allen’s door, I knocked, heard a grunt, and went in.

He was standing in front of his mirror, holding a handglass so he could see his profile. With some dark stuff, maybe Mary’s mascara, he had painted on a narrow black mustache, had darkened his brows and raised the outer ends to satanic tips. He was smiling a world-wise, cynical charm into the mirror when I entered. And he was wearing my blue polka-dot bow tie. He did not seem embarrassed at being caught.

“Rehearsing for a turn,” he said and put the hand-mirror down.

“Son, in all the excitement I don’t think I’ve told you how proud I am.”

“It’s—well, it’s only a start.”

“Frankly, I didn’t think you were even as good a writer as the President. I’m as much surprised as I am pleased. When are you going to read your essay to the world?”

“Sunday, four-thirty and a national hookup. I have to go into New York. Special plane flying me.”

“Are you well rehearsed?”

“Oh, I’ll do all right. It’s just a start.”

“Well, it’s more like a jump to be one of five in the whole country.”

“National hookup,” he said. He began to remove the mustache with a cotton pad and I saw with amazement that he had a make-up kit, eye-shadow, grease paint, cold cream.

“Everything’s happened at once to all of us. Do you know I’ve bought the store?”

“Yeah! I heard.”

“Well, when the bunting and the tinsel come down, I’m going to need your help.”

“How do you mean?”

“I told you before, to help me in the store.”

“I couldn’t do that,” he said, and he inspected his teeth in the hand-mirror.

“You couldn’t do what?”

“I’ve got a couple of guest shots and then ‘What’s My Line?’ and ‘Mystery Guest.’[74] Then there’s a new quiz coming up called ‘Teen Twisters.’[75] I might even get to M.C. that. So you see I won’t have time.” He sprayed something sticky on his hair from a pressure can.

“So your career is all set, is it?”

“Like I told you, it’s just a start.”

“I’ll not let loose the dogs of war tonight. We’ll discuss it later.”

“There’s a guy from N.B.C. been trying to get you on the phone. Maybe it’s a contract because like I’m not of age.”

“Have you thought of school, my son?”

“Who needs it if you got a contract?”

I got out fast and closed the door and in my bathroom I ran the water cold and iced my skin and let the cold penetrate deep to control my shaking rage. And when I emerged clean and shining and smelling of Mary’s perfume, my control was back. In the few moments before dinner, Ellen sat on the arm of my chair and then rolled over in my lap and put her arms around me.

“I do love you,” she said. “Isn’t it exciting? And isn’t Allen wonderful? It’s like he’s born to it.” And this was the girl I had thought very selfish and a little mean.

Just before the cake I toasted the young hero and wished him luck and I finished, “ ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.’ ”

“That’s Shakespeare,” Ellen said.

“Yes, muggins, but what play, who says it, and where?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Allen. “That’s for squares.”

I helped carry the dishes to the kitchen. Mary still carried her glow. “Don’t fret,” she said. “He’ll find his line. He’ll be all right. Please be patient with him.”

“I will, my holy quail.”

“There was a man calling from New York. I guess about Allen. Isn’t it exciting, their sending a plane for him? I can’t get used to you owning the store. I know—it’s all over town you’re going to be Town Manager.”

“I’m not.”

“Well, I heard it a dozen times.”

“I have a business deal that makes it impossible. I have to go out for a while, my darling. I have a meeting.”

“Maybe I’ll get to wish you were back a clerk. You were home nights then. What if the man calls back?”

“He can wait.”

“He didn’t want to. Will you be late?”

“Can’t tell. Depends on how it goes.”

“Wasn’t it sad about Danny Taylor? Take a raincoat.”

“Sure was.”

In the hall I put on my hat and on an impulse picked old Cap’n’s narwhal cane from the elephant foot. Ellen materialized beside me.

“Can I go with you?”

“Not tonight.”

“I do love you.”

I stared deep into my daughter for a moment. “I love you too,” I said. “I’ll bring you jewels—any favorites?”

She giggled. “You going to carry a cane?”

“For self-protection.” I held the spiraled ivory at parry, like a broadsword.

“You going to be gone long?”

“Not long.”

“Why do you take the cane?”

“Pure decoration, a boast, a threat, a fear, a vestigial need to bear arms.”

“I’ll wait up for you. Can I hold the pink thing?”

“Oh, no you won’t, my little dung-flower. Pink thing? You mean the talisman? Sure you may.”

“What’s a talisman?”

“Look it up in the dictionary. Know how to spell it?”

“T-a-l-e-s-m-a-n.”

“No, t-a-l-i-s-m-a-n.”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“You’ll know it better if you look it up.”

She locked her arms around me and squeezed and as quickly let me go.

The night closed thick and damp about me, humid air about the consistency of chicken broth. The street lights hiding among the fat leaves of Elm Street sprouted damp, hairy halos of moisture.

A man with a job sees so little of the normal daylight world. No wonder he must get his news and his attitudes from his wife. She knows what happened and who said what about it, but it is strained through her womanness, wherefore most working men see the daylight world through women’s eyes. But in the night, when his store or his job is closed, then is a man’s world risen—for a time.

The twisted staff of narwhal ivory felt good in my hand, its heavy silver knob polished by old Cap’n’s palm.

Once long ago when I lived in a daylight world, the world being too much with me,[76] I would have gone to grass. Face downward and very close to the green stems, I became one with ants and aphids and sow bugs, no longer a colossus. And in a ferocious jungle of the grass I found the distraction that meant peace.

Now in the night I wanted Old Harbor and the Place, where an inevitable world of cycles of life and time and of tide could smooth my raggedness.

I walked quickly to the High Street, and only glanced across at my green-curtained store as I passed the Foremaster. In front of the fire station fat Willie sat in the police car, red of face and sweating like a pig.

“You on the prowl again, Eth?”

“Yep.”

“Terrible sad about Danny Taylor. Nice fella.”

“Terrible,” I said and hurried on.

A few cars cruised about, building a breeze, but there were no strollers. No one risked the sweat of walking.

I turned at the monument and walked toward Old Harbor and saw the anchor lights of a few yachts and offshore fishing craft. Then I saw a figure turn out of Porlock Street and come toward me and I knew by walk and posture it was Margie Young-Hunt.

She stopped in front of me, gave me no chance of passing. Some women can look cool on a hot night. Perhaps it was the breezy movement of her cotton skirt.

She said, “I guess you’re looking for me.” She replaced a strand of hair that wasn’t out of place.

“Why do you say that?”

She turned and took my arm and with her fingers urged me to walk on. “That’s the kind I get. I was in the Foremaster. I saw you go by and I thought you might be looking for me, so I whipped around the block and intercepted you.”

“How’d you know which way I would turn?”

“I don’t know. I knew. Listen to the cicadas—that’s more hot weather and no wind. Don’t worry, Ethan, we’ll be out of the light in a moment. You can come to my place if you want. I’ll give you a drink—a tall cold drink, from a tall hot woman.”

I let her fingers guide me into the shadows of a grove of outgrown privet. Some kind of yellow blossoms near the ground burned the darkness.

“This is my house—a garage with a pleasure dome over it.”

“What makes you think I was looking for you?”

“Me or someone like me. Ever see a bullfight, Ethan?”

“Once at Arles just after the war.”

“My second husband used to take me. He loved them. I think bullfights are for men who aren’t very brave and wish they were. If you saw one you’ll know what I mean. Remember after all the cape work when the bull tries to kill something that isn’t there?”

“Yes.”

“Remember how he gets confused and uneasy, sometimes just stands and looks for an answer? Well, then they have to give him a horse or his heart will break. He has to get his horns into something solid or his spirit dies. Well, I’m that horse. And that’s the kind of men I get, confused and puzzled. If they can get a horn into me, that’s a little triumph. Then they can go back to muleta and espada.”[77]

“Margie!”

“Just a moment. I’m trying to find my key. Smell the honeysuckle!”

“But I’ve just had a triumph.”

“You have? Hooked a cape—trampled it?”

“How do you know?”

“I just know when a man is looking for me, or some other Margie. Watch the stairs, they’re narrow. Don’t hit your head at the top. Now, here’s the switch—you see? A pleasure dome, soft lights, smell of musk—down to a sunless sea!”[78]

“I guess you’re a witch all right.”

“You know goddam well I am. A poor, pitiful small-town witch. Sit there, near the window. I’ll turn on the fake breeze. I’m going to what they call ‘slip into something comfortable,’ then I’ll get you a tall cool skull-buster.”

“Where’d you hear that word?”

“You know where I heard it.”

“Did you know him well?”

“Part of him. The part of a man a woman can know. Sometimes that’s the best part, but not often. It was with Danny. He trusted me.”

The room was a memory album of other rooms, bits and pieces of other lives like footnotes. The fan at the window made a small whispering roar.

She came back soon in long, loose, billowing blue and brought a cloud of scent. When I breathed it in she said, “Don’t worry. It’s a cologne Mary has never smelled on me. Here’s a drink—gin and tonic. I rubbed the glass with tonic. It’s gin, just gin. If you rattle the ice, you’ll think it’s cool.”

I drank it down like beer and felt its dry heat reach out over my shoulders and down my arms so that my skin shimmered.

“I guess you needed that,” she said.

“I guess so.”

“I’ll make a brave bull of you—enough resistance so you’ll think you have a triumph. That’s what a bull needs.”

I stared at my hands, crisscrossed with scratches and tiny cuts from opening boxes, and my nails, not too clean.

She took the ivory stick from the couch where I had dropped it. “I hope you don’t need this for your drooping passion.”

“Are you my enemy, now?”

“Me, New Baytown’s playmate, your enemy?”

I was silent so long that I could feel her growing restless. “Take your time,” she said. “You’ve got all your life to answer. I’ll get you a drink.”

I took the full glass from her and my lips and mouth were so dry I had to sip from it before I could speak, and when I did my throat wore a husk.

“What do you want?”

“I might have settled for love.”

“From a man who loves his wife?”

“Mary? You don’t even know her.”

“I know she’s tender and sweet and kind of helpless.”

“Helpless? She’s tough as a boot. She’ll go right on long after you’ve rattled your engine to pieces. She’s like a gull that uses the wind to stay aloft and never beats a wing.”

“That’s not true.”

“Comes a big trouble, she’ll breeze through while you burn up.”

“What do you want?”

“Aren’t you going to make a pass? Aren’t you going to beat out your hatred with your hips on good old Margie?”

I set my half-emptied glass down on a side table, and quick as a snake she lifted it and put an ash tray under it, and dried the ring of moisture with her hand.

“Margie—I want to know about you.”

“No kidding. You want to know what I thought of your performance.”

“I can’t figure what you want until I know who you are.”

“I believe the man means it—the dollar tour. Through Margie Young-Hunt with gun and camera. I was a good little kid, a smart little kid and a medium lousy dancer. Met what they call an older man and married him. He didn’t love me—he was in love with me. That’s on a silver platter for a good smart little kid. I didn’t like to dance much and I sure as hell didn’t like to work. When I dumped him he was so mixed up he didn’t even put a remarriage clause in the settlement. Married another guy and led a big world whirl that killed him. For twenty years that check has zeroed in on the first of every month. For twenty years I haven’t done a lick of work, except pick up a few presents from admirers. Doesn’t seem like twenty years, but it is. I’m not a good little kid any more.”

She went to her little kitchen and brought three ice cubes in her hand, dumped them into her glass, and sloshed gin over them. The muttering fan brought in the smell of sea flats exposed by the dropping tide. She said softly, “You’re going to make a lot of money, Ethan.”

“You know about the deal?”

“Some of the noblest Romans of them all are creepers.”

“Go on.”

She made a sweeping gesture with her hand and her glass went flying; the ice cubes bounced back from the wall like dice.

“Lover boy had a stroke last week. When he cools, the checks stop. I’m old and lazy and I’m scared. I set you up as a backlog, but I don’t trust you. You might break the rules. You might turn honest. I tell you I’m scared.”

I stood up and found my legs were heavy, not wavery—just heavy and remote.

“What have you got to work with?”

“Marullo was my friend too.”

“I see.”

“Don’t you want to go to bed with me? I’m good. That’s what they tell me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“That’s why I don’t trust you.”

“We’ll try to work something out. I hate Baker. Maybe you can clip him.”

“What language. You’re not working on your drink.”

“Drink’s for happy times with me.”

“Does Baker know what you did to Danny?”

“Yes.”

“How’d he take it?”

“All right. But I wouldn’t like to turn my back.”

“Alfio should have turned his back to you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Only what I guess. But I’d make book on my guess. Don’t worry, I won’t tell him. Marullo is my friend.”

“I think I understand; you’re building up a hate so you can use the sword. Margie, you’ve got a rubber sword.”

“Think I don’t know it, Eth? But I’ve got my money on a hunch.”

“Do you want to tell me?”

“Might as well. I’m betting ten generations of Hawleys are going to kick your ass around the block, and when they leave off you’ll have your own wet rope and salt to rub in the wounds.”

“If that were so—where does it leave you?”

“You’re going to need a friend to talk to and I’m the only person in the world who fills the bill. A secret’s a terribly lonesome thing, Ethan. And it won’t cost you much, maybe only a small percentage.”

“I think I’ll go now.”

“Drink your drink.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Don’t bump your head going downstairs, Ethan.”

I was halfway down when she followed me. “Did you mean to leave your stick?”

“Lord, no.”

“Here it is. I thought it might be a kind of—sacrifice.”

It was raining and that makes honeysuckle smell sweet in the night. My legs were so wobbly that I really needed the narwhal stick.

Fat Willie had a roll of paper towels on the seat beside him to mop the sweat from his head.

“I’ll give you odds I know who she is.”

“You’d win.”

“Say, Eth, there’s been a guy looking for you—guy in a big Chrysler, with a chauffeur.”

“What’d he want?”

“I don’t know. Wanted to know if I seen you. I didn’t give a peep.”

“You’ll get a Christmas present, Willie.”

“Say, Eth, what’s the matter with your feet?”

“Been playing poker. They went to sleep.”

“Yeah! they’ll do that. If I see the guy, shall I tell him you’ve went home?”

“Tell him to come to the store tomorrow.”

“Chrysler Imperial. Big son of a bitch, long as a freight car.”

Joey-boy was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Foremaster, looking limp and humid.

“Thought you were going into New York for a cold bottle.”

“Too hot. Couldn’t put my heart in it. Come in and have a drink, Ethan. I’m feeling low.”

“Too hot for a drink, Morph.”

“Even a beer?”

“Beer heats me up.”

“Story of my life. When the cards are down—no place to go. Nobody to talk to.”

“You should get married.”

“That’s nobody to talk to in spades.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Damn right I am. There’s nobody as lonely as an all-married man.”

“How do you know?”

“I see ’em. I’m looking at one. Guess I’ll get a bag of cold beer and see if Margie Young-Hunt will play. She don’t keep hours.”

“I don’t think she’s in town, Morph. She told my wife—at least I think she did—that she was going up to Maine till the heat is over.”

“Goddam her. Well—her loss is the barkeep’s gain. I’ll tell him the sad episodes of a misspent life. He don’t listen either. So long, Eth. Walk with God! That’s what they say in Mexico.”

The narwhal stick tapped on the pavement and punctuated my wondering about why I told Joey that. She wouldn’t talk. That would spoil her game. She had to keep the pin in her hand grenade. I don’t know why.

I could see the Chrysler standing at the curb by the old Hawley house when I turned into Elm Street from the High, but it was more like a hearse than a freight car, black but not gleaming by reason of the droplets of rain and the greasy splash that rises from the highways. It carried frosted parking lights.

It must have been very late. No lights shone from the sleeping houses on Elm Street. I was wet and I must somewhere have stepped in a puddle. My shoes made a juicy squidging sound as I walked.

I saw a man in a chauffeur’s cap through the musty windshield. I stopped beside the monster car and rapped with my knuckles on the glass and the window slid down with an electric whine. I felt the unnatural climate of air-conditioning on my face.

“I’m Ethan Hawley. Are you looking for me?” I saw teeth in the dimness—gleaming teeth picked out by our street light.

The door sprang open of itself and a lean, well-tailored man stepped out. “I’m Dunscombe, Brock and Schwin, television branch. I have to talk to you.” He looked toward the driver. “Not here. Can we go inside?”

“I guess so. I think everyone’s asleep. If you talk quietly…”

He followed me up our walk of flagstones set in the spongy lawn. The night light was burning in the hall. As we went in I put the narwhal stick in the elephant’s foot.

I turned on the reading light over my big sprung-bottomed chair.

The house was quiet, but it seemed to me the wrong kind of quiet—a nervous quiet. I glanced up the stairwell at the bedroom doors above.

“Must be important to come this late.”

“It is.”

I could see him now. His teeth were his ambassadors, un-helped by his weary but wary eyes.

“We want to keep this private. It’s been a bad year, as you well know. The bottom fell out with the quiz scandals and then the payola fuss and the Congressional committees. We have to watch everything. It’s a dangerous time.”

“I wish you’d tell me what you want.”

“You’ve read your boy’s I Love America essay?”

“No, I haven’t. He wanted to surprise me.”

“He has. I don’t know why we didn’t catch it, but we didn’t.” He held out a folded blue cover to me. “Read the underlining.”

I sank into my chair and opened it. It was either printed or typed by one of those new machines that looks like type, but it was marred with harsh black pencil lines down both margins.

I riffled through the pages and saw the black marks everywhere.

“Do you recognize it?”

“No. It sounds familiar—sounds like maybe somewhere in the last century.”

“It is. It’s Henry Clay, delivered in 1850.”

“And the rest? All Clay?”

“No—bits and pieces, some Daniel Webster, some Jefferson, and, God help me, a swatch from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. I don’t know how that got past. I guess because there were thousands of them. Thank Christ we caught it in time—after all the quiz troubles and Van Doren and all.”

“It doesn’t sound like the prose style of a boy.”

“I don’t know how it happened. And it might have gone through if we hadn’t got the postcard.”

“Postcard?”

“Picture postcard, picture of the Empire State Building.”

“Who sent it?”

“Anonymous.”

“Where was it mailed from?”

“New York.”

“Let me see it.”

“It’s under lock and key in case there’s any trouble. You don’t want to make trouble, do you?”

“What is it you want?”

“I want you to forget the whole thing. We’ll just drop the whole thing and forget it—if you will.”

“It’s not a thing easy to forget.”

“Hell, I mean just keep your lip buttoned—don’t give us any trouble. It’s been a bad year. Election year anybody will dig up anything.”

I closed the rich blue covers and handed it back to him. “I won’t give you any trouble.”

His teeth showed like matched pearls. “I knew it. I told them. I looked you up. You have a good record—good family.”

“Will you go away now?”

“You’ve got to know I understand how you feel.”

“Thank you. And I know how you feel. What you can cover up doesn’t exist.”

“I don’t want to go away leaving you angry. Public relations is my line. We could work something out. Scholarship or like that—something dignified.”

“Has sin gone on strike for a wage raise? No, just go away now—please!”

“We’ll work something out.”

“I’m sure you will.”

I let him out and sat down again and turned out the light and sat listening to my house. It thudded like a heart, and maybe it was my heart and a rustling old house. I thought to go to the cabinet and take the talisman in my hand—had stood up to get it.

I heard a crunching sound and a whinny like a frightened colt, and quick steps in the hall and silence. My shoes squidged on the stairs. I went in to Ellen’s room and switched on the light. She was balled up under a sheet, her head under her pillow. When I tried to lift the pillow she clung to it and I had to yank it away. A line of blood ran from the corner of her mouth.

“I slipped in the bathroom.”

“I see. Are you badly hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“In other words, it’s none of my business.”

“I didn’t want him to go to jail.”

Allen was sitting on the edge of his bed, naked except for jockey shorts. His eyes—they made me think of a mouse in a corner, ready at last to fight a broom.

“The stinking sneak!”

“Did you hear it all?”

“I heard what that stinking sneak did.”

“Did you hear what you did?”

The driven mouse attacked. “Who cares? Everybody does it. It’s the way the cooky crumbles.”

“You believe that?”

“Don’t you read the papers? Everybody right up to the top—just read the papers. You get to feeling holy, just read the papers. I bet you took some in your time, because they all do. I’m not going to take the rap for everybody. I don’t care about anything. Except that stinking sneak.”

Mary awakens slowly, but she was awake. Perhaps she hadn’t been asleep. She was in Ellen’s room, sitting on the edge of the bed. The street light made her plain enough with shadows of leaves moving on her face. She was a rock, a great granite rock set in a tide race. It was true. She was tough as a boot, unmoving, unyielding, and safe.

“Will you be coming to bed, Ethan?”

So she had been listening too.

“Not now, my darling dear.”

“Are you going out again?”

“Yes—to walk.”

“You need your sleep. It’s still raining. Do you have to go?”

“Yes. There’s a place. I have to go there.”

“Take your raincoat. You forgot it before.”

“Yes, my darling.”

I didn’t kiss her then. I couldn’t with the balled and covered figure beside her. But I touched her shoulder and I touched her face and she was tough as a boot.

I went to the bathroom for a moment for a package of razor blades.

I was in the hall, reaching in the closet for a raincoat as Mary wished, when I heard a scuffle and a scramble and a rush and Ellen flung herself at me, grunting and snuffling. She buried her bleeding nose against my breast and pinned my elbows down with encircling arms. And her whole little body shook.

I took her by the forelock and pulled her head up under the hall night light.

“Take me with you.”

“Silly, I can’t. But if you’ll come in the kitchen, I’ll wash your face.”

“Take me with you. You’re not coming back.”

“What do you mean, skookum? Of course I’m coming back. I’m always coming back. You go up to bed and rest. Then you’ll feel better.”

“You won’t take me?”

“Where I’m going they wouldn’t let you in. Do you want to stand outside in your nightgown?”

“You can’t.”

She grappled me again and her hands caressed and stroked my arms, my sides, dug her balled fists into my side pockets so that I was afraid she might find the razor blades. She was always a caressing girl, a stroking girl, and a surprising girl. Suddenly she released me and stood back with her head raised and her eyes level and without tears. I kissed her dirty little cheek and felt the dried blood against my mouth. And then I turned to the door.

“Don’t you want your stick?”

“No, Ellen. Not tonight. Go to bed, darling. Go to bed.”

I ran away fast. I guess I ran away from her and from Mary. I could hear Mary coming down the stairs with measured steps.

Chapter twenty-two

The tide was on the rise. I waded into the warm bay water and clambered into the Place. A slow ground swell moved in and out of the entrance, flowed through my trousers. The fat billfold in my hip pocket swelled against my hip and then grew thinner under my weight as it water-soaked. The summer sea was crowded with little jellyfish the size of gooseberries, dangling their tendrils and their nettle cells. As they washed in against my legs and belly I felt them sting like small bitter fires, and the slow wave breathed in and out of the Place. The rain was only a thin mist now and it accumulated all the stars and town lamps and spread them evenly—a dark, pewter-colored sheen. I could see the third rock, but from the Place it did not line up with the point over the sunken keel of the Belle-Adair. A stronger wave lifted my legs and made them feel free and separate from me, and an eager wind sprang from nowhere and drove the mist like sheep. Then I could see a star—late rising, too late rising over the edge. Some kind of craft came chugging in, a craft with sail, by the slow, solemn sound of her engine. I saw her mast light over the toothy tumble of the breakwater but her red and green were below my range of sight.

My skin blazed under the lances of the jellyfish. I heard an anchor plunge, and the mast light went out.

Marullo’s light still burned, and old Cap’n’s light and Aunt Deborah’s light.

It isn’t true that there’s a community of light, a bonfire of the world. Everyone carries his own, his lonely own.

A rustling school of tiny feeding fish flicked along the shore.

My light is out. There’s nothing blacker than a wick.

Inward I said, I want to go home—no not home, to the other side of home where the lights are given.

It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.[80] The world is full of dark derelicts. The better way—the Marulli of that old Rome would have known it—there comes a time for decent, honorable retirement, not dramatic, not punishment of self or family—just good-by, a warm bath and an opened vein, a warm sea and a razor blade.

The ground swell on the rising tide whished into the Place and raised my legs and hips and swung them to the side and carried my wet folded raincoat out with it.

I rolled on one hip and reached in my side pocket for my razor blades and I felt the lump. Then in wonder I remembered the caressing, stroking hands of the light-bearer. For a moment it resisted coming out of my wet pocket. Then in my hand it gathered every bit of light there was and seemed red—dark red.

A surge of wave pushed me against the very back of the Place. And the tempo of the sea speeded up. I had to fight the water to get out, and I had to get out. I rolled and scrambled and splashed chest deep in the surf and the brisking waves pushed me against the old sea wall.

I had to get back—had to return the talisman to its new owner.

Else another light might go out.[81]